Right shoot me down if this is too much of a silly question,

I have just taken over admin of 5 servers one of which is a linux box (soon to be 2, then 3...hopefully but anyway) There is a slight ip address conflict on the system the exteranl facing ip addys of the system go from xxx.xxx.xxx.2 - 6.
The linux box being 5, I have noticed that one of the win machines keeps dropping the terminal services connections over the internet, so I looked into it and found that the linux both has a an alias, I think it is called, that listens on it's ip; but it is not a big error, i.e. neither machines comlain of the conflict ever 10 or 20 seconds or so as they do on a LAN when ips conflict, in fact the win box only has 4 mentions of this conflict in it's event log for the last year.

linux box ifconfig:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
inet addr:xxx.xxx.xxx.5 Bcast:xxx.xxx.xxx.31 Mask:xxx.xxx.xxx.224
inet6 addr: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4366215 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7164214 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:512638318 (488.8 MiB) TX bytes:728437252 (694.6 MiB)
Interrupt:169

eth0:1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx(same as above!)
inet addr:xxx.xxx.xxx.6 Bcast:xxx.xxx.xxx. Mask:xxx.xxx.xxx..0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
Interrupt:169

I have three questions really: I am told that this has been done for a reason, can anyone think of a reason?

Also I have tried to stop the eth0:1 and it brings the whole network down, after which I needed to reboot, is there a way just to stop this alias. I would like to do it with little or no down time as this machine hosts a web shop.

I cannot find a script that starts this eth0:1, but it appeared again after the reboot, there is not ifcfg-eth0:1 file, or mention of it in the ifcfg-eth0 file. The only places in etc where that ip is mentioned is /etc/addrpool /etc/ips /etc/nameserverips and httpd conf.

I would be very grateful if someone could offer me a little advicer in this situation.

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