I have a server sitting behind a Huawei HG569 router. Port forwarding has been set up through the router and, when it works, it works as one would expect.
Now, the problem is that the HG569 router uses MAC addresses to determine which ports to forward to what machine, unlike every other router in this class I've ever seen which uses IP addresses. The server has teamed NICs and when the server needs to reboot it picks (seemingly at random) one of the two MAC addresses of the NICs in the team.
There are (from what I can see) three solutions to the issue:
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Change the router; use one that uses IP addresses to port forward. The problem here is that the ISP won't support this configuration leaving me effectively on my own and having to plug back in the ISP supplied router in the event of an issue
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Somehow allow the protocols to be forwarded to be associated with multiple MAC addresses. While the UI appears to allow this, in practice it will not allow me to add multiple devices to each protocol
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Force the server OS (Windows Server 2016) to consistently use one of the two MAC addresses in its team. I'm aware of the ability to be able to do this in Device Manager but is it really as simple as picking one of the two physical MAC addresses and typing it into the virtual NIC's MAC address?
Perhaps there's another way that I'm missing. If there is then I'd really appreciate someone pointing out a way to get this done.
Best Answer
There is no such thing as "Layer 2 Port forwarding". The MAC Layer is just the access layer, there are no ports to connect or forward. I think your router is learning just one IP from it's connected clients by matching it to it's MAC-Table. Sometimes this is done to stop forwarding if a device is down, to limit the traffic on the WAN side. Thats stupid, but ...
In that case, all you can do is fix the multihome MAC.