NIC Load Balancing & Failover brings DHCP issues

[Rachelsdad]

Here's an odd one... Perhaps I'm just not remembering correctly how I used to set this up.

Server is NW 6.5 SP7, not clustered. It has two NICs. IP & IPX are both on the wire.

The primary NIC has an address of 192.168.100.1, and secondary addresses of .101 and .102.

I configured the secondary NIC for load balancing and fault tolerance (IP; I already had IPX bound to both). I can not assign the secondary IP addresses to it, as I get an error that these addresses have already been assigned. Okay...

I have ensured that both NICs are cabled to the switch. ;-)

On the DHCP server screen (loaded with -d1 or -d3), I see clients sending DHCP DISCOVER packets, and the server responding with address assignments. However, the clients (OS/2 and Linux) do not see a response (well, a lone Windows XP box did, apparently...).

I've flushed ARP tables all around. It appears that the responses are going out over the second NIC (load balancing?), and the clients are then ignoring them. However, as a test, I only configured for fault tolerance, which should have left the secondary NIC offline until the first was disconnected; I saw the same symptom. As soon as I unbound IP from the second NIC, everything went back to normal, and the clients were able to receive their info and ACK.

I'm sure I'm missing something simple, here, and need a minor kick in the head.

Thanks!