Workshop

problem determination will definitely start to decrease.
Identifying the Fault Domain: “In the Beginning…”
Unless you have a crystal ball or some sort of network-management software, your first inkling that
something is wrong with your network will have nothing to do with your network and everything to do
with your telephone. Particularly if your organization has multiple sites or multiple network segments,
you’re not always going to personally suffer during a network outage; therefore, you won’t know what’s
happening unless someone (or something) lets you know.
I’ll cover network management software in Hour 22. However, for the moment, let’s assume you haven’t
invested in such software and are relying on your telephone to explode at the speed of light when the
network gets into trouble.
First, you should ask the person at the other end of the phone whether other users have this same
problem. It may take some doing to tickle this answer out of the caller; he or she is understandably upset,
may have lost work, may have a deadline, and so on. You’ll need to be polite but firm—you can’t
provide help if you don’t know the scope of the problem.
If other users are experiencing the same problem, then the problem is systemic—that is, it’s a pretty safe
bet that everybody’s PC hasn’t malfunctioned in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.
Therefore, the answer can be found in something that all the PCs have in common—their common
network “glue.” Here’s a list of items PCs are commonly connected to (in the order of “more local” to
“less local”):
• Hubs
• Switches
• Routers
• Servers
If you’re lucky, the first 90 seconds of the trouble call should tell you where the problem lies, which is
pretty cool. Once you know what type of problem it is, the troubleshooting takes care of itself. If you
know the problem is systemic, you can sometimes practice the techniques we discussed in Hour 4, “The
Napoleon Method: Divide and Conquer.” If you know the problem is local (PC related), you can
relax—at least you don’t have a lot of people down. What’s more, if you’ve practiced the network
consistency techniques we discussed in Hour 16, your likelihood of getting this person back up quickly is
quite high.
Diving into Details