Workshop

Hour 17
Where Do I Start?
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You’re not obligated to finish the task; neither are you free to neglect it.
—R. Tarfon, Pirkey Avot (Chapter 2, Mishna 21)
The answer to “where do I start?” could be this: Every day, try to improve things just a little bit. This is
known as proactive troubleshooting in geek speak, and you got a good glimpse of what it’s about with
documentation in Hour 2, “You Can’t Have Too Much Documentation, Money, or Love” and
homogenization in Hour 16, “Beauty Is Consistency Deep: Saving Yourself Trouble.” (We’ll look a little
more at proactive troubleshooting in Hour 22, “Who Watches The Watchmen?: Network Management
Tools.”)
The best kind of troubleshooting is the kind where you stop problems before they start. However,
proactive troubleshooting is a little bit like peace, love, and understanding. (What’s so funny?) This is all
great and everything, and it’s definitely worth shooting for (pardon the phrase); however, no matter how
much you make things better, you’ll still have to engage in reactive troubleshooting when things don’t go
as planned. Just as you’ll continuously work on your proactive troubleshooting by documenting,
observing your network, and planning, you’ll also continuously be reactively troubleshooting. It’s
inevitable.
Even though we’d all rather avoid problems before they start by learning what causes problems and
enacting policies and procedures to avoid them in the future, even as we do this, new problems have a
way of popping up. Proactive and reactive troubleshooting are simply the yin and the yang of the
troubleshooting game. You’ll never get done with either; all you can do is make each one less painful.
Accordingly, in this hour, we’ll reexamine the basics of how to get started with reactive troubleshooting
of networking problems, whether those problems are application related, network protocol related, or
physical network related. This will allow you to then further hone in on what the problem might be,
based on the theory and composition behind the component.
No book can provide you with a cool head during a network combat situation. However, as this stuff is
demystified for you, and you start to form your own set of troubleshooting reaction habits, you’ll start to
see that whatever the spooky problem is, the source will eventually rear its ugly head if you keep
plugging away. At the point at which this all becomes more common to you, your stress level during