A systems administrator is troubleshooting a connectivity issue on a multi-homed server, SRV-MULTI01. The server has two NICs: NIC1 is on the 192.168.50.0/24 subnet for user traffic, and NIC2 is on the 10.0.10.0/24 subnet for management traffic. The server can successfully communicate with all devices on the 192.168.50.0/24 subnet and can reach the internet for OS updates via its default gateway. However, it is unable to connect to a monitoring server located at the IP address 10.0.20.15. Other servers on the 192.168.50.0/24 subnet can reach the monitoring server without issue. The administrator has already confirmed that local firewall rules on SRV-MULTI01 are not blocking the traffic.
Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of this issue?
The switch port for NIC1 is configured with an incorrect VLAN tag.
The DHCP server is assigning an incorrect default gateway to NIC2.
The DNS server is failing to resolve the hostname of the monitoring server.
The server's operating system has an incorrect route table configuration.
The correct answer is that the server's operating system has an incorrect route table configuration. In a multi-homed server scenario, the OS must have a correctly configured routing table to direct traffic to networks not on directly connected subnets. Since the server can reach its local subnets and the internet (via the default gateway, likely on NIC1), but not a specific remote subnet (10.0.20.0/24), it indicates a missing or incorrect static route. The OS doesn't know to send traffic for 10.0.20.15 via the gateway on the management network (NIC2). An administrator would use a command like route print on Windows or ip route on Linux to view the table and add a persistent static route to resolve the issue.
A VLAN misconfiguration would likely disrupt all communication on the affected NIC's subnet, but the scenario states that communication on the 192.168.50.0/24 subnet is working correctly.
A DNS server failure is irrelevant because the administrator is attempting to connect via an IP address, which does not require DNS resolution.
An incorrect default gateway assigned by DHCP is less likely to be the root cause. A multi-homed server typically has only one default gateway to avoid routing conflicts. The problem is the lack of a specific route to a remote network, not an issue with the default route for all outbound traffic.