Overview: “We’ve run into a bit of trouble with the Network.” As a junior networ
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Question
Overview: “We’ve run into a bit of trouble with the Network.” As a junior network administrator, you have been asked by your managers to perform a series of tasks to support the functionality of the network at Newton Ad Agency. Now you have been given responsibility of managing and troubleshooting some networking issues between Austin and Minneapolis. Recently, there have been reports of intermittent network connectivity between Minneapolis and Austin that have resulted in several router restarts with no resolutions to the problem. Jim and Jenna have task you with identifying the root cause of the issue.
In this assignment, you will write a paper that explains in a clear, convincing manner the steps you would take to identify the causes of this problem and what you would do to correct it.
Scenario: Network professionals often find that issues with a network reflect particular conditions specific to a business case. Therefore, a great way to approach this troubleshooting assignment is to reflect on what you have learned about Newton Ad Agency and its networking conditions. Again, here is the Newton Scenario that informs your work throughout the course:
The Newton Ad Agency is an advertising firm with offices in Austin, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and New York City, New York. The offices in Austin include a headquarters and a satellite office located two miles away in a rural area.
The Austin headquarters is home to the executive team and 750 employees. The headquarters also stores the corporate data and is the corporate internet backbone. It hosts the IT department that centrally manages all LAN services, including the wireless LAN. The IT department also manages the wide area network (WAN) that connects all of the offices via site-to-site virtual private network (VPN) tunnels.
The Minneapolis and New York offices host about 200 employees each. Approximately 50% of these employees are mobile (i.e., travelling more than 80% of the time). The New York office focuses on producing and disseminating large advertising media content to clients. For this reason, the New York office hosts the corporate media and web servers. The rural satellite office in Austin focuses on billboard ad designs and is connected to the corporate WAN with a wireless point-to-point bridge to the Austin headquarters data center. The rural office is home to 100 employees.
To hire and retain the best talents, Newton Ad Agency allows employees to work from home. This removes the constraint that employees have to live within commuting distance from the firm’s offices. Remote and mobile employees are provided access to the corporate network via a VPN client. The VPN client requires employees to have access to reliable internet services to allow for effective collaboration across teams, and for access to media content. The company provides all employees with a laptop with full disk encryption, data loss prevention (DLP), and antivirus software. The IT department manages all corporate laptops and has the ability to log into all systems for support. This means that all laptops are centrally managed by the one IT department.
As you review this scenario, check to see how the reported trouble with the network may arise from what you know about Newton and use these observations to inform your answer.
I want original 400-550 words on this please
Explanation / Answer
The company’s operations is spread across Austin and Minneapolis via a VPN connection. As a network administrator, I need to perform certain steps to troubleshoot what is causing the issue and diagnose it.
Router restart may cause that when you open a website it will show as “Page not found”.
The steps to diagnose and correct the network issue are as follows:
Step 1: Restart the router
This might seem quite obvious and basic at start, but this should be done as routers tend to get overloaded and tired due to continuous running 24x7 and due to which incoming and outgoing packets tend to pile up and get distorted while transmitting through the router. Hence delays happen and sometimes internet does not work at all. Switch of the router for at least 3-5 mins to cool it off and then start it and check the connection. A simple manual restart may correct the network issue.
Step 2: Isolate the network problem
Check each and every network component test if the incoming and outgoing packets are routed correctly or not. Check the Wireless network access points, Switch.
Sometimes issues may happen in browsers, cealring cookies and cache does the trick.
Check if internet is partially down, for example emails are being sent or received but no webpages are being opened. This is caused by HTTP data travelling over worng port.For example port 25 instead of port 80.
Once the potential problem is identified the troubleshooting can begin.
Step 3: Follow the network path
When a problem establishing an Internet connection in occurring, one of the ways to resolve it is to determine where the communication breakdown is occurring. Testing using the Ping command to trace the data path out of your network and to the Internet. As an administrator, you will need to know your PC and router/gateway IP addresses.
Also check the VPN is working correctly or not by turning off the VPN and all firewalls and checking if the website is opening normally or not. If it is opening then need to check VPN settings.
Trace the domain name into the DNS server and verify if the DNS server is routing to the correct domain IP address or not.
Step 4: Malicious activity
In this step need to check if some malwares have entered the network or not. Check when last firmware, firewalls and windows update was done. Was the network exposed to the external internet without the firewall any time also run a full virus scan to check malwares present in the network and potential root cause of malwares entering the network.
Step 5: Minimize network complexity
After everything is done and issue has been identified and resolved an attempt should be made to simplify the network architecture by removing unnecessary switches, router or connections so that in future if an issue occurs troubleshooting will be a lot easier.
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