More fun in Networkland......ghost computer!

Today I was packing up my LaCie Ethernet Mini network drive to send back to Newegg. It died on me a few days ago, so I got an RMA # from Newegg and planned to return it. As I was unplugging the drive, I noticed the RJ45 plug seemed awfully tight, so I decided to use another cord just to make sure that wasn't the problem. I got another cord and fired it up. The little green LED was blinking on the RJ45 plug on the back of the LaCie just like it did back when it was working.....but I still could not access the drive at 192.168.47.49 which is where it's supposed to be.

So I did a scan of my network (192.168.47.x)and rather than clear up the LaCie mystery, I discovered another one. The scanner report showed a computer named "quick" (because that's the computer on which we use Quickbooks ) on my network. The trouble is, this computer died 3 weeks ago. It is in the back warehouse ready to be thrown away. It is unplugged from the network and from keyboard and mouse too. So how could it be there? I pinged it at 192.168.47.45 and got a prompt reply. I pinged it by name and got another prompt reply. I was freaked out about this ghost computer on my network and forgot all about the LaCie drive. And then it hit me......It was the LaCie drive that was answering my pings!! Apparently, it had at some point been given a new IP address by the DHCP server so when I tried to access it at the old address, it would not work. But how could it be answering to the name quick?

Well, I looked in my Win 2003 server DNS and there was an old manual entry (by me no doubt) that identifies 192.168.47.45 as "quick". So when I pang "quick", the DNS server returned 192.168.47.45 and the LaCie drive answered the ping!! But it didn't say "Hey by the way, I'm the LaCie drive, not your old accounting computer". It just said "I'm here dude". It took a brilliant flash of incite to realize how stupid I had been.

So the LaCie drive now lives at the IP address that quick used to have. And I'll be sending a humble email to Newegg saying that their LaCie drive didn't die after all. And it wasn't a bad ethernet cord, it was a bad network administrator.

I shouldn't get so confused so easily, but hey, it's been awhile since that CCNA exam.....