Hi Guys,

First post here, so forgive me if this has been covered before.

I had a router die at a customer site (Thompson ST620) i sent up a replacment router that we had in stock, Vigor 2820n, preconfigured and was plugged straight in and came online.

Oddly - none of the Server 2008 boxes could see the router consistently.

You could do a few pings, that would succeed, then you would get destination unreachable. Same was true from the vigor back to the servers.

Bit of a brainteaser for a while i can tell you.

It seems that the issue is caused by Broadcom network card teaming.

These servers are DeLL PE 2900, they have 2 Broadcom NICs that are configured to team up for load balancing.

I fixed the server issue by adding a static ARP entry for the vigor and it's IP.

That is fine, now the server can see the internet and get online.

I have one issue remaining, which is that i cannot publish services on the servers through the router because the vigor cannot see the server still, intermittently.

It seems to be 'some weird ARP thing' between which MAC the teamed adapter sends out, and which one the Vigor is picking up.

So looking in the arp cache you might see a NIC ending in :92 but on the server the teaming configuration shows a MAC ending :94.

There doesnt seem to be a way to change this, and a static IP to MAC in the Vigor did not help either.

I think the only option i have until replacing the failed ST620 is to disable network teaming.

Anyone else seen this or have any ideas?

I have had a similar problem with Windows 2008 Network Load Balancing. This uses 2 machines.

With NLB the network adapter uses a multicast mac address, but a normal unicase IP address. I suspect that the adapter teaming uses something similar. My research on the issue turned up the settings that need to be in place on Cisco equipment to allow this. Most other routers are already fine with it, but Draytek's are NOT and seem to have no option to make it work either.


I have some Dell servers at work (R710s) setup with Broadcom network teaming enabled and have no problem with a Draytek router. However my Team is setup as an 802.1ad team and connects to a Switch which supports 802.1ad teams. That might mean the equipment "down the line" such as the router don't need any special support.

I've been able to get NIC teaming to work well with a switch that supports it, but on the PC side I had to set up LACP in static mode I think? You need to be able to have the NIC team present just one MAC address then it'll work.