today i was proposed with an interesting challenge, i had two identical VM’s running, with the same name, and static IP settings, one one production, and one was not, it was my job to figure it out. So what did i do?

the first thing i did was open up a command prompt and type the following to remove all my cached ARP/DNS Settings

netsh interface ip delete arpcache

pinged the device to get some basic information

ok, so we know the device resolves to 192.168.1.111 from there i issued the following command:

arp -a

this lists all the devices that are in the ARP table of your local computer

as you can see, i was able to find out what the MAC address of the NIC that was responding

from there, i went in, found out what system was the live, and what one was dead by issuing the following command at the local system command prompt:

ipconfig /all

that was it!

All thanks to ARP, and Ping, i could not have done it without you! For Networking experts and consultants visit www.zwiegnet.com/go to get started