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hypercubeFlag for United States of America

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Windows 7 Networking Multiple NICs

I have a Windows 7 Pro machine with 3 NICs.  One is the main network NIC and has worked fine for some time.  The other two are wired to managed switch monitoring ports using random, off subnet, ip addresses .. since they only need to receive.  Then I can look at them with Wireshark.
(I don't want the monitor traffic on the main subnet of course).
This has worked very well.
Suddenly I can't see any of the computers on the network.
now if I use net view, I get the "can't be found or opened" message.

So I changed the node type to broadcast or "1" in the registry.

Now net view shows my computer as the Master Browser.  But it's on one of the monitor NIC IP addresses!!  ??

So, I disabled the monitor NICs and now I can see the computers on the network.  
But I don't want them disabled.

I don't understand what happened to cause this.  I'd like to understand.
If there's a better way to do monitoring, I'd like to know.
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chubby_informer
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try putting fixed IP on all your NIC and run pings from various points of your network.
this would test - connectivity, see if the problems in in your IP leasing, NIC

ping from one NIC to the other onthe same machine.

is you firewall blocking your IP or NIC? SEP has a feature to that that...

i think that its your local firewall
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ASKER

????
All of the IP addresses are static.
The main LAN subnet is 10.0.2.0/24.  The main NIC for this computer uses 10.0.2.155
The other two NICs use 192.168.2.1 and 192.168.3.1 and only connect to the switch mirror ports.

The issue is with the main NIC seeing other computers on the LAN subnet.
It occurs to me that there is no way for the OS to know which is the "main" NIC for the LAN except that the two "monitor" NICs don't have a gateway entry.

Is that all or is there some other way to distinguish for things like Master Browser election, etc?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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Svet Paperov
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