Please answer the bolded sections about network connectivity. The rest is just b
ID: 2257821 • Letter: P
Question
Please answer the bolded sections about network connectivity. The rest is just background information for the scenario.
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.
Explain 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. Be sure to clearly identify and list troubleshooting steps and proposed solutions.
Explanation / Answer
There can be multiple root cause for this intermittent network connectivity issue between Minneapolis and Austin. The possible root causes are listed below:
1) There can be various faults, errors or the discards present in the various network devices of the network.
2) May be some network device configuration change caused this intermittent issue.
3) May be some human error that have done misconfiguration or mismanagement of the network and its devices.
4) Intermittent issue can also be caused due to intermittent power outage.
5) Security attack like DOS ie denial of service can also cause this problem.
6) Due to network congestion link failure can occur that can also cause the intermittent network connectivity issue.
According to me from the above given causes, power outage or network congestion can be the root cause of this intermittent network connectivity.
We can take following given action to avoid such type of things in the future:
1) For these types of problems, the solution lies in the continuous network monitoring. With continuous network monitoring only we can solve these types of intermittent issues. Because these types of issues are very less to occur and its also not issue to reproduce these issues.
2) We can use network monitoring tools that will closely monitor the network devices as well as the network configurations and warn us through various level of alarms in case of any abnormal condition comes in the network.
3 We can also take up the "Network configuration management" solution. This solution helps us to monitor the network configurations and the devices and alert us in case of unauthroized change happen and also provide recommended suggestions.