Re: unexpected job offer
- From: "blastingfonda" <blastingfonda@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 23 May 2005 16:53:51 -0700
Wayne wrote:
> Two difficult situations come to my mind right away as they
> can't wait. How to handle if everyone lost internet access?
> How to handle if no one is getting email?
I found that making the leap from desktop support person to server
admin wasn't that hard because some of the core approaches are the
same. Essentially in either situation, you play the role of detective.
When you are presented with an issue, you methodically go about
determining the potential causes and narrowing down the scope of the
issue by process of elimination. The same is true managing a server.
When you come across a problem, you make a checklist - be it a physical
or mental one - listing all the potential causes for a problem. The
most likely causes are at or near the top. Some difficult issues though
require you to eliminate all the obvious answers and dig deeper -- do
some Googling or searches on the relevant vendor's tech support
websites, maybe ask a friend who is experienced in your field.
You can take solace in the fact that virtually no issue is
insurmountable - parts can be swapped out, hardware replaced, OSes
wiped and reconfigured. As long as all your company's data and the
system states of your domain controller(s) are backed up, there is no
"crisis" that you can't handle.
Now, to get to your specific questions - if everyone lost internet
access, I'd first go about pinging the router that your company uses
for internet access. Since this is a small 20 seat company, chances are
this is also the Default Gateway address that all the computers in your
subnet are pointed to. (do an ipconfig /all command to see this.) If
you can ping the router's internal interface IP address, then see if
you can ping the external IP. If you can ping the external IP and your
router seems to be working in every other respect, the problem may very
well be with your vendor or ISP - I had to call the local telecom quite
a bit whenever idiot construction workers across the street would cut
our lines.
If you have any problems pinging the router, the router's likely gone
bad. Sometimes a power cycle / reboot of the router fixes minor issues.
Or you could have a bad cable somewhere.
Now, if you have internet access and for some reason people aren't
getting e-mail, you can pretty much narrow the scope of the issue to
your e-mail server. This could be anything from the the network
interface(s) on the server going bad, the cabling going to the e-mail
server going bad, any switches the server might be hooked up to going
bad (or even individual ports), the server's OS crashing, the e-mail
server application (i.e. Exchange) crashing, a hard drive failing, etc.
Go to the physical box and ping outward to see if you can reach other
computers on the LAN and your company's router.
Again, use the process of elimination to determine the root cause(s) an
issue (could potentially be more than one). Be methodical and eliminate
the biggest concerns. And always make sure you have the latest security
patches and updates installed on all your key servers.
.
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