Two nics same IP address

General Help
1

I have a freepbx with two nics. One is configured with static IP. We think it might be causing dropped calls if its getting tired. Can i assign the same IP to the second nic and just swap the cable from nic 1 to nic 2.

2

Not really. There are ways to do that, but you have to have switch support and the operating system has to be ready for it.

You can do other things that might help. For example, you can have the traffic from the “outside world” delivered to one of your NICs and traffic on your local network delivered through another one. I often setup a special (not VLAN) LAN for the phones and just drop it onto the local network. Set up the phone server so that it delivers DHCP addresses on that network for the phones and make sure it’s all on the one LAN, then add another address block for the other things on the network and connect the other Ethernet port to that.

For example - phones on 192.168.50.x/24 and the rest of your machines on 192.168.0.x/24. The phones won’t be able to talk directly to the Internet (without special firewall rules) but will be able to communicate with the phone server even if everything is actually on one (or two) switch (or switches). It’s like setting up a VLAN, but without the stupidity that having to make sure everyone can support VLANs. This way, telephone traffic from the outside heads out on ‘eth0’ and the phone traffic shows up on ‘eth1’.

3

so my best bet, is take IP off of first nic and apply it to the second nic, and then just move the cable from the first nic to the second nic. We think we may have a bad nic causing random dropped calls. we aren’t getting any error codes in the logs, and im not sitting on top of this server watching for dropped calls. I dont have the experience that others do with this phone system, so all the help i get is from the forums. :frowning:

4

My experience is that electronics don’t generally “get tired”. They either work, or they don’t. (All electronics actually work on magical blue smoke… once the magical blue smoke is released, they stop working) :smiley:

Anyway, I’d be looking at other causes. Bad cable, arp tables need to be flushed, switch reset, etc.

5

I did notice that when a call tries going out the outbound trunk it fails and fails over to the inbound trunk. would that cause any issues with random call drops. im trying everything at this moment, but dont want to cause lose of service.

6

That could be a number of things causing this issue, not necessarily a NIC failure.

7

I found the issue. misconfiguration in the outbound trunk was causing outbound calls to fail over to the inbound trunk and killing inbound calls. Fix the “forbidden” error and outbound calls successfully completed on the outbound trunk.

2 Likes
8

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.