Cisco 1701 router question

TCP/IP

Hi there,

I am in the middle of a project at the moment that involves the use of a Cisco 1701 router:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps221/ps5270/index.html

The problem I have is that when I connect a Windows 2000 server to the Nic on the router the link light does not come up yet if I use a switch and put a cable from the router to the uplink on the switch and then run a patch lead to the server it comes up fine, but I still can not ping the router. A BT engineer can plug his laptop directly into the router and the link light comes on and he can ping the router no problem.

Does anybody have an idea of the best way to go about connecting this all up

Thanks,
TCP/IP

Capt'n Midnight

TCP/IP wrote:

The problem I have is that when I connect a Windows 2000 server to the Nic on the router the link light does not come up

It won't unless you are using a crossover cable Or a Gigabit card that auto configures itself for the crossover.

TCP/IP wrote:

yet if I use a switch and put a cable from the router to the uplink on the switch and then run a patch lead to the server it comes up fine,

The switch provides the crossover.

but I still can not ping the router. A BT engineer can plug his laptop directly into the router and the link light comes on and he can ping the router no problem.

Do you know the IP address of the router - if your servers address isn't in the same range the router won't respond. (or some one may have set it up not to reply to pings n' stuff.) If all else fails use WinDump or Ethereal to monitor the network traffic coming out of the router when you power it on - you may need to replace the switch with a hub or use a crossover cable to connect directly to the router.

It's a safe bet that a small standalone router is NOT on DHCP as you'd expect them to be more stable than your DHCP server. Serial cable is best way to setup a new router to give it an IP address. - Serial cable means you have physical access to it and [if all else fails] it's possible to interrupt the boot sequence with Ctrl-Break / Break (if your terminal app supports it) and enter the rommon console, before it loads the IOS config file - this sort of thing you'd do if you didn't have the password or the config was toast.

TCP/IP

hi mate thanks for the reply, the address of the server and router are in the same range so thats not the problem, its really strange on even with the switch it still is not able to be pinged, but from another laptop it is namely the BT engineers one.

Really is a weird one, what would be the best equipment to bring over to the site again to see what could be causing the issue

Capt'n Midnight

Are the subnet masks are the same ?
or what else could be different on the BT laptop ??

if it's a third party router then you can't look at or change the config which means trouble shooting is a pain.

ressem

Can you clarify that you checked for crossover cables?

Most probable reason for the no link light is that you require a crossover network cable. (If you're not sure of the cabletype check whether the wire colours in the plug match at each end. A match indicates a straight through cable.)
If you don't have a crossover cable, a cheap hub + 2 straight through cables can substitute.

What sort of switch are you using? If there's a designated uplink port it might not be autosensing (Don't suppose it's a managed one, from which you can ping & monitor directly)
You mentioned that you were connecting to the uplink port. What if you use a standard switch port instead?

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Does the windows server have more than one network card? E.g. are you planning on running ISA on the server that is connected between the router and the switch? In which case the routing on the server might be messed up.

Provided that you have the same IP, subnet and gateway on the laptop as the BT machine, are using the same cable, directly connected to the same router port, you should be able to use your own test machine instead of the BT laptop and ping.
You have tried pinging from a machine other than the server?

TCP/IP

thanks for the replys lads, i have checked the ip address and the subnet masks all ok there. I have used crossover and normal cables the switch i am using is a netgear gigabit switch with an uplink port

Snaga

Sounds like an ethernet auto negotiation issue between the router and your servers NIC.

Go into the Network connections section on the server and get to the properties section of your LAN.

Click on 'Configure' at the top to get into your NIC properties.

On the advanced tab you should see settings for 'Speed' and Duplex'.

If this is not set to 'Auto' - then set it to auto and see if you get link.
If it is set to 'Auto' - hard code this to...

Duplex Full
Speed 100

If that doesnt work you will need the BT engineer to hard code his port to Duplex full, speed 100 aswell. (assuming you dont have access). This should give you link.

You might be able to bring up link temporarily by trying the other combinations (below) on your servers nic but you want 100/FULL for anything permanent (As you will get some packet errors if there is a mismatch).

i.e.
Duplex Full Speed 100
Duplex Full Speed 10
Duplex Half Speed 100
Duplex Half Speed 10