Bit of a technical question but I know there are some network gurus hovering around here.

I have a NAS server (Server 2003 R2) with dual Intel Pro/1000 EB connections. When I put these into SLA (static link aggregation) and configure SLA on the switch ports Vista machines lose connection.

I can only re-establish connection if I ping the machines against each other and wait for them to respond, the trick is I have to catch it in the middle of the response, stop the pings and connect to the network drives. The ping responses only last around 20pings and only happen every 300-400 pings. Once I get the connection back it seems to hold fine. If the Vista machine is rebooted I have to go through the whole process again.

I have turned off SLA and put the connections into ALB (adaptive load balance) and everything works fine. I have turned off STP on the switch and all the testing shows the links are working as expected. I have other servers running SLA with various Intel Pro/1000 NICs and they run fine, Vista can connect no problems.

I'm running the latest Intel 13.1.2 drivers and Vista is fully patched.
Its a fairly specific problem but thought given the variety of knowledge on this forum someone might have a clue.

are you saying that there's a mix of vista and other machines, and only the vista machines have the issue? or is there only vista machines on the network and it might well happen with machines running other o/s's as well if there were any?

I've got XP, 2000, citrix terminals, Vista and a debian machine. The only one that has issues with this configuration is Vista. Yes yes Vista sucks etc etc, we are testing it for upgrades, we all have to move on eventually.

No way maens I have a vmware 6.22 machine

what kind of switch?

wasn't lookin to bash vista, just wanted to know whether or not to rule out vista as being a possible issue or not. if it happened to any o/s you could probably just focus on the switch and server config

have you done much googling for vista arp issues?

Not much there other than saying change the NIC. Seems like overkill for something that is clearly software related. The NIC team works fine in ALB mode but not in SLA only the vista clients have issues. Have flushed ARP cache etc etc.

Its a Linksys managed 48port Gigabit switch.

Might have to try it with another NIC.

I've had problems before with vista connecting to smb shares.

Just ended up buggering off the Link-Layer topology options and it seemed to work after that. Have no idea why and didn't get to spend anymore time on it to find out why.

what steps did you take to clear the arp cache? did you examine it first? what mac is being advertised out from the switch for the aggregated link? is that the mac the vista client is seeing during the period that the pings are responding? is that the same mac that working clients (xp etc) are seeing? what does tcpdump show about the mac that is being given, when hosts are asking who-has the ip of your server?

this info may be pertinent if the mac that's being advertised, is changing as a result of either the server-side nic teaming config or the switch config:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949589