Sams Teach Yourself Network Troubleshooting in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Q&A

Q1:

I’ve read that the Internet at large uses routing protocols different from a typical local area network, so how can troubleshooting techniques on my intranet apply to Internet troubleshooting?

A1:

True, the routers on the Internet are major beefcake. (I hear that some of them use steroids.) But although they might use different routing protocols, they’re still routers. A packet that comes in on one interface must be routed to another interface and passed off to the “next hop” or dropped if the destination is unreachable. Seriously, the routing protocols are merely methods of routing table updates—as such, they don’t matter to us because we’re not ISPs. We just care about pointing to the trouble and reporting it. If a packet isn’t doing ...