Cisco router cannot ping its own up interface

ciscorouter

I have been troubleshooting using ping on both 2600 and 3700 series Cisco routers. The ping is done on interfaces that have status of up, line protocol up. On FastEthernet interfaces, if status is up and line protocol is up, the router can successfully ping the ip address of its own FastEthernet interface. For Serial interfaces, if status is up and line protocol is up, in some cases the router cannot ping its own serial interface IP address.

Can someone give any explanation as to why a ping on the router's own interface should fail for a Serial interface in an up/up state?

R4#show ip interface brief
Interface                  IP-Address      OK? Method Status                Protocol
FastEthernet0/0            192.168.10.1    YES NVRAM  up                    up
Serial0/0                  192.168.1.2     YES NVRAM  up                    up
FastEthernet0/1            unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial0/1                  192.168.4.1     YES NVRAM  up                    up
R4#ping 192.168.1.2

Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 192.168.1.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
....

Best Answer

Are the serial interfaces frame-relay? If so, you'll need to map the local interface IP to one of the active DLCIs in order to ping the interface.

interface Serial0/0
 ip address 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0
 frame-relay map ip 192.168.0.2 102 broadcast
 frame-relay map ip 192.168.0.1 102