win32 - failed to determine dst mac address for target - i wanna help

["Louie Jagoe" <jagoe () stnoble com>]

Hiya,

I have the perfect test environment for helping to troubleshoot this
"failed to determine dst mac address for target" problem. There seem to
be a number of people (guaged by googling) having this problem (and I'm
one of them) so I'd like to help solving it. (Just for the record, I
have researched this problem in forums, newsgroups and on the web so I
don't believe I'm overlooking the obvious or re-inventing the wheel.)

Basically I have three machines in the test bed, one of which works
perfectly:

        machine #1 - Toshiba Tecra 9100, winxp pro, sp2, fully patched

        machine #2 - Dell Dimension 8400, winxp pro, sp2, fully patched

        machine #3 - (old) Dell Precision workstation, win2k, sp4, fully
patched


All machines have winpcap 3.1 and the microsoft network monitor driver
installed. They all have no trouble running snort. The nmap distros on
these machines are all downloaded w32 binaries.

Machine #1 works fine with nmap-3.81, nmap-3.93, nmap-4.01 and
nmap-4.02Alpha2.

Machine #2 (same os and patch set as machine #1) with nmap-4.01 gives
the dreaded "failed to determine dst mac address for target" only when
trying to scan hosts outside of its network segment (i.e. layer 2 across
a router). In other words, nmap works fine on the home lan.

Machine #3 (different os altogether) with nmap-4.01 gives exactly the
same behaviour as machine #2

Preliminary comparison of registry settings yielded nothing useful. The
windows xp firewall has also been ruled out. So from where I sit I have
the perfect lab environment for patch testing. I don't have the time to
roll up my sleeves and get into the source (it would take me a month
just to get up to speed again on vc++ and tcp/ip programming). But I can
offer my services on a sys/network admin level and try out patches or
config suggestions.

I wasn't sure that the nmap dev list was such a good starting point,
thus the reason for this email.

Please advise,

Louie

=====================================================
Louis Jagoe, Director
St. Noble Company                 Geneva's IT Experts
Geneva, Switzerland            http://www.stnoble.com 
=====================================================  


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