Hello Everyone, Iam looking into the office network here this week to see if I can discover the cause of our network slowdowns and I came across an odd (I think) behaviour. I found that my exchange server 2007 (on windows server 2003)was pinging my Active Directory server (also on a windows server 2003) on average about 30 times every minute. Doesn't this seem a bit excessive? I know this is not the cause of my network slowdown but I still find it odd network activity. Any Ideas? Neil Mackie

Is that really ping or are that LDAP querries? Deli

first off thank you for your interest in my question.From my understanding of LDAP it uses the TCP protocol and in these ping packets the only protocols being used are eth,IP, ICMP and of course some data. I'm capturing the packets using wireshark and they are displayed as ICMP echo ping requests and the AD server responds with echo ping replies. Do LDAP queries use an ICMP ping to keep a 'heartbeat' on servers or perhaps to serve some other function?

I don't think that it is normal behavior then Exchange pings the DC every 30 seconds Do you have some monitoring software running Deli

There is no monitoring software at all installed on the server. I am only running exchange 2007, IIS for the Outlook Web Access and Symantec for antivirus. I'm not even running an SNMP program on my network yet. I wish there was a way for me to tell which program was sending out the network packets so I could trace them back. However I do not know of a way to do this. For now it seems these pings will remain a mystery. I'll let you know if I ever come across the answer.