I have windows 2008 R2 standard edition installed with two NICs: NIC 1: 192.168.2.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 Gateway 192.168.2.1 NIC 2: 192.168.3.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 Gateway 192.168.3.1 each NIC is connected directly with cross-over cable to server (no switch/hub): Server 1: 192.168.2.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.2.2 Server 2: 192.168.3.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.3.2 I was able to connect to either servers and everything was working fine (ping and other services) till last night when I introduced a switch to replace the cross-over cables. I lost connection to the two servers. after removing the switch and rebooting the win2008 server, I'm still not able to get the connections. my questions is, would windows 2008 require any special services or premissions to get this networking status to where it was? I rebooted the entire system many times. thanks

are you sure that your switch is configured correctly? can you provide route print from the server with 2 NIC's? >>my questions is, would windows 2008 require any special services or premissions to get this networking status to where it was? No, if you want only to be able to communicate with Server 1 and Server 2 from server with two NICsWith kind regards Krystian Zieja http://www.projectnenvision.com Follow me on twitter My Blog

Hi I think the switch you put in place is a layer 2 device and not a Layer 3 device meaning either it does not suport routing or is not configured for routing and so is just doing the plain old packet switching. Now inorder to connect your servers to a switch and have them communicating, you need to either place all the servers in the same subnet e.g 192.168.2.x subnet mask 255.255.255.0 with this subnet configured on all the servers (preferably jus connect one NIC to the switch not two if your server has dual NICs), and then connected to the switch they should be able to communicate without any problems. If you prefer that the server be in different subnets you will need a router and possibly two switches. But if your switch is a Layer 3 switch e.g Cisco 3550 or other you can create 2 vlans on the switch specify ip addresses for the different vlans (these will be the gateways for your servers), configure inter-vlan routing and then connect the servers to their relevant vlan access ports and they will be able to communicate. tech-nique