Windows 7 not connecting to W2003SR2 Shares but allowing login

I was able to mess with things a bit more today and if I run a command prompt as admin and issue ping -4 ipaddress it works. If I run normal ping ipaddress I will get no reply (request time out) or some times 1 reply then time out. Actually I take that back. That worked for a few seconds but while I was typing this up it stopped working. Now neither ping works. Well maybe 1 reply then timed out. This is really inconvenient and driving me batty - I think my rectification is going to be to remove the dc server down here and run stand alone pc's and use this office to test out migration from exchange to gmail for domains!

Well I think this turned out to be my router assigning the wrong MAC address to the nic card.

DAXQ said:

Well I think this turned out to be my router assigning the wrong MAC address to the nic card.

The router should be picking up the MAC address from the NIC, not assigning it an incorrect one.

Agreed - just wasn't sure if it was a bad nic or the router doing something weird, but if I take the router off the switch things work - if I add it back - intermittently I will see Mac addresses getting assigned the router mac address rather than the printer MAC address as it should. This has definitely been an experience.

For fun, try this:

Try changing these settings in Control Panel>Administrator Tools>Local Security Policy:

* Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security
Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (always): Disabled

* Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security
Network security: LAN Manager authentication level: Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated

Restart the system after making changes.

My demon was Arp Proxy running on a new Cisco ASA router I installed. Apparently it was handing out its own address for things like my Printer and the AD controller in the LAN - don't care what kind of proxy it is, it never should have done that for something on the same LAN as itself on the inside. Very annoying and hard (for me anyway) to track down.

DAXQ said:

My demon was Arp Proxy running on a new Cisco ASA router I installed. Apparently it was handing out its own address for things like my Printer and the AD controller in the LAN - don't care what kind of proxy it is, it never should have done that for something on the same LAN as itself on the inside. Very annoying and hard (for me anyway) to track down.

It sounds like it was shoving it's own MAC address in other hardware as it forwards requests. It looks like it's made to forward requests between two different subnets. It should have only been using router proxy when sending requests between the two subnets.

Course I never realized that this ARP was enabled on this router. Is it part of the firmware or is it an add on?

Maybe because it was MAC spoofing "Router Proxying" all requests, Windows security might have blocked it from forwarding those packets. The part in bold below might explain it.

After reading about Arp Proxy at Wiki it says that it's designed to hand out it's own MAC address. Apparently it offers its own MAC address in reply, effectively saying, "send it to me, and I'll get it to where it needs to go."

Just in case anyone else reading this wonders what ARP does.

Advantages
The advantage of Proxy ARP over other networking schemes is simplicity. A network can be extended using this technique without the knowledge of the upstream router.
For example, suppose a host, say A, wants to contact another host B, where B is on a different subnet/broadcast domain than A. For this, host A will send an ARP request with a Destination IP address of B in its ARP packet. The multi-homed router which is connected to both the subnets, responds to host A's request with its MAC address instead of host B's actual MAC address, thus proxying for host B. In the due course of time, when host A sends a packet to the router which is actually destined to host B, the router just forwards the packet to host B. The communication between host A and B is totally unaware of the router proxying for each other.

Disadvantages
Disadvantage of Proxy ARP include scalability (ARP resolution is required for every device routed in this manner) and reliability (no fallback mechanism is present, and masquerading can be confusing in some environments). ARP manipulation techniques, however, are the basis for protocols providing redundancy on broadcast networks (e.g., Ethernet), most notably CARP and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol.
Proxy ARP can create DoS attacks on networks if misconfigured. For example a misconfigured router with proxy ARP has the ability to receive packets destined for other hosts (as it gives its own MAC address in response to ARP requests for other hosts/routers), but may not have the ability to correctly forward these packets on to their final destination, thus black holing the traffic.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_ARP

It supposedly will help an improperly configured network, (like if the mask was off or something) still work. In my case it did not - it just broke things, and drove me up the wall trying find what was doing it.

DAXQ said:

It supposedly will help an improperly configured network, (like if the mask was off or something) still work. In my case it did not - it just broke things, and drove me up the wall trying find what was doing it.

Was it part of the routers firmware or some type of add on?