I have a bit of a problem dealing with 2 NICs on a server. A few weeks back we set up redundant license servers on our network, the next day one of the computers meant to be one of the 3 servers died so I took the NIC from it, which the licenses are tied to, and put it into one of our other servers.

I am able to ping and SSH to the hostname of the old NIC fine while still being able to use the original one. The problem I have however is that the license script does not use the correct NIC when trying to check out a license.

The first MAC is the NIC that should be used, the second MAC is the one being used under the other host name.

Is there a way to specify which network connection is used to access the internet so that the "external" NIC used would be the second one that I added? I want to leave both NICs active as this system is a main point of traffic so having network on eth0 and internet on eth1 would be the preferred option.

May be "traceroute -I 208.67.222.222" can help you.

Are you sure you have the correct IP address assigned to the 'old' NIC?

BTW, what does the output of ifconfig -a look like? That will give us a better idea of what's going on.

-Mats

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:24:8C:39B:EE
inet addr:192.168.1.30 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::224:8cff:fe39:dbee/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:9990896 errors:0 dropped:83189891031877 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:23465000 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1847537211 (1.7 GiB) TX bytes:7205506150 (6.7 GiB)
Interrupt:98 Base address:0xa000

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:22:B0:62:37:3A
inet addr:192.168.1.53 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::222:b0ff:fe62:373a/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:121591 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:22856 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:10419124 (9.9 MiB) TX bytes:6110008 (5.8 MiB)
Interrupt:74

eth0 is the onboard NIC, eth1 is the second NIC installed from the old computer, they are both getting the IP assigned by DHCP. Running a traceroute shows nothing as the first hop is to the router and it doesn't show the outgoing address. Going by the log from the license though it's clear that eth0 is being used for outgoing connections.

I just tried disabling the gateway on eth0 and leaving the gateway active on eth1, it made no difference, the license log still returned the same error.

Since it's tied to the mac address, it seems like you need to force the licensing software to use Eth1 via it's config files. If you can't force it that way, the next thing I would try is reversing the order of the cards (if possible) so the NIC that the licenses are tied to will come up as Eth0. Depending on what this server is doing, that could have ramifications for other services so be carefull.

-Mats

I think I got it mostly figured out this morning. I tried pinging out of eth1 and was getting destination host unavailable. Adding a static route to the gateway fixed that issue, the licenses no longer complain about the host id but it still doesn't connect to the redundancy servers. If the server can ever go a day without being constantly used I'll try switching the interface order to put the .53 network as eth0.