Abu Alam

4-2 Scenario-Based Assignment: Troubleshooting

IT 340: Network and Telecom Management: Professor Sabato

March 28, 2020

To troubleshoot any network connectivity issues, it is important to gather facts about the

issues and define the issues in detail. In this case, there are intermittent network connectivity

issues between the offices in Austin and Minneapolis of the Newton Ad Agency. The next strep

in the troubleshoot process is that all the relevant possibilities have to be considered which may

be causing issues. Depending on these assumptions of possibilities, plan has to be created and

implemented to resolve the issue. The plan has to be revisited and altered if the implementation

of the plan did not resolve the issue. Documentation of the whole procedure is imperative as well

for troubleshooting future network issues.

Several router restarts did not resolve the intermittent network outages between the

Austin and the Minneapolis offices. Since the Austin headquarters provide the internet backbone

and support and manage WAN of all the locations, the router configuration and TCP/IP at the

Austin offices have to be checked. Assigning static IP address to all hosts for such a large

company with numerous employees (a lot of whom are mobile) would be difficult to manage.

Therefore, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) has to be enabled. To try and locate

the network connectivity issue, Windows command prompt tools, such as ping, traceroute can be

used to try and locate the exact area of the network where the issue is occurring. Another

Windows command prompt tool that can be used is the ipconfig tool. The ipconfig tool
(ipconfig /release, ipconfig /renew) can be used to either release all the IP address assigned by

the DHCP, renew all the IP address as well as display and clear DNS (Domain Name System)

cache (ipconfig /displaydns, ipconfig /flushdns).

The most likely issue in this case is the fact that since Austin is the internet backbone and

provides main support for the WAN throughout all the offices, the DHCP servers here provide IP

addresses over the network as well as the DHCP servers providing DNS in Minneapolis. To

avoid this confusion, the DHCP servers in all the locations of Newton Ad Agency has to be

configured to be able to communicate with each other and use the Austin servers as the primary

servers. Because there are separate LANs interconnected together to form the WAN managed by

the Austin headquarters, the routers and the DHCP servers in Minneapolis, New York city and

all other locations have to be configured to communicate and exchange information with the

servers and routers at the Austin headquarters, making them the primary controllers of the WAN.

Once all the servers in different locations can communicate and exchange information with the

primary servers in Austin, the intermittent network connectivity issues/outages will be resolved.