Head First Networking

Chapter 9. Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Listen to Your Network’s Troubles

Listening to your network can save you lots of heartache!

Well, you have your network up and running. But like anything, it needs to be monitored and maintained. If it’s not, one day it will just stop working, and you will have no idea why. You will discover in this chapter various tools and techniques to help you listen to your network and understand what is going on with it, so you can deal with any problem before it becomes a bigger problem.

Pajama Death are back on tour

Punk band Pajama Death have a large and dedicated fan base, and they’ve just announced their latest world tour. Tickets go on sale in just two hours, and fans are already lining up to buy prized tickets. The ticket agency expects it to be a sell-out, but there’s just one problem: can their network cope with the strain?

So here’s your challenge...

The ticket agency needs to be up and running in two hours time, which means that you need to troubleshoot the immediate problems. What’s more, you need to make sure that the network remains stable. You need to deal with network problems before they become bigger problems. Think you can do it?

So where would you start troubleshooting a misfiring network?

Since you have made it this far in this book, you ...