Workshop

Because many servers are nothing more than pumped up PCs with faster and better hard drives, CPUs,
and so on, many of these hardware techniques apply to servers as well.
The PC Thing to Do
A user’s PC is often the culprit of a network problem. Although a PC is essentially just an assemblage of
pluggable circuit boards and chips and can be troubleshot from that angle, you should also consider its
low-level software configuration when troubleshooting. Your PC’s lowest level software is its BIOS
(Basic Input/Output System), which is responsible for making all the boards and chips talk to each other
in a civil manner.
The BIOS
You can get into a PC’s BIOS by pressing the Del, F1, or F2 key right after you power on the PC.
(Ctrl+Alt+Esc used to be popular, but I haven’t seen this one in quite some time.) The BIOS setup screen
can range from fairly complex to reasonably simple. Typically, a name-brand PC’s BIOS is simpler than
a generic clone’s, because the name-brand manufacturer exercises greater standardization over which
components are connected to its motherboards. A typical BIOS screen is text-based, with no Windowsstyle
controls.
A BIOS setup screen can be compared with other “known good” PCs from the same manufacturer in
order to verify that the settings are correct. If you don’t have another PC of the same type, you can
always reset to the defaults. This can often correct a problem that some nut behind the keyboard might
have caused.
For example, certain memory settings are configurable at the BIOS screen, as are certain Plug and Play
settings. If one of these is changed to an incorrect value, your system may start malfunctioning in the
most interesting of ways. In particular, certain non-Plug and Play network cards, for example, have
limited IRQ (Interrupt Request) numbers they can use; if the BIOS reserves these IRQs for Plug and Play
devices, your network card will either not work at all or will behave erratically.
Be sure to write down your BIOS settings before you reset to the defaults, because you might need some
of those settings later. Typically, resetting your BIOS to its defaults won’t hurt anything, but you never
can tell.
Some PCs have the option to print BIOS settings to a local printer—if yours does, go for it. Printing out
your settings beats the heck out of writing everything down.