yuhs
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Windows 2000/2003 Print servers making large number of ARP broadcasts...why?
I have been doing random sniffer/packet scans of my network to check things out over the past few days, using Ethereal.
There seems to be a constant flood (80% of total packets) of ARP traffic for some reason, both during business hours and off.
What's odd is that the ARP traffic is coming from my two Windows 200/2003 print servers. They are broadcasting ARP requests constantly trying to verify IPs on the same subnet as the printer server.
My network uses DNS, no WINS. "Netbios over TCP" is disabled on the servers. Hosts file, Lmhosts are empty.
Does anyone know why my print servers are making these constant broadcasts? This is worrying me......
There seems to be a constant flood (80% of total packets) of ARP traffic for some reason, both during business hours and off.
What's odd is that the ARP traffic is coming from my two Windows 200/2003 print servers. They are broadcasting ARP requests constantly trying to verify IPs on the same subnet as the printer server.
My network uses DNS, no WINS. "Netbios over TCP" is disabled on the servers. Hosts file, Lmhosts are empty.
Does anyone know why my print servers are making these constant broadcasts? This is worrying me......
Other possible reasons: virus infections, antivirus software agents, malfunctioning NIC, ...
ASKER
I figured it out............!
Our print servers have a dozen or so printers installed that aren't online, but we need to keep the queues ready to use, so we don't delete them.
What's happening is that the server is using ARP to ping the offline printers constantly, trying to initialize the queues.
SO......does anyone know how to stop a print server from constanly pinging offline printers? I wish I could award more than 500 points for this potential solution as this is worth much more to me!
Our print servers have a dozen or so printers installed that aren't online, but we need to keep the queues ready to use, so we don't delete them.
What's happening is that the server is using ARP to ping the offline printers constantly, trying to initialize the queues.
SO......does anyone know how to stop a print server from constanly pinging offline printers? I wish I could award more than 500 points for this potential solution as this is worth much more to me!
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840156
Are the 2 servers running sp1 or sp2 yet? If not, it may be worthwhile to at least put SP1 on them and see if that clears up the broadcast requests.
Another possible solution would be to try clearing the arp cache on both print servers:
Open a command prompt and type: netsh interface ip delete arpcache