Network troubles

Walked in this morning to a network issue.

"Hey kelly, The database is down and email is not working well." says the user.

"I'm on it." says I.

I started pinging around. Maybe it is trouble with one of the switches that died last week. More pinging. More pinging. Restart some switches. Isolate systems and section of the network. Davide and identify. Where is the dead line? Where is the dead switch? Where is the dead computer?

It boiled down to rebooting a file server. Things started working for the most part.

The database that has our computers and connections listed in it will not come up. I cannot look up a machine if the system goes offline. I thought I had written down the machines I needed to worry about, but of course, I do not have them all in that notebook. Thus, I do not have the one I need. How in the world can you keep that kind of information in a manner where it is both accessible and maintainable? Why, a database of course. A database which is ... wait for it ... on the network. It still ended up working out.

Our time clock runs off a database as well. How else would you do it? Anyway, the service that runs on the server machine has to write the updated data out to a table so the display machines around the building can display the data in a human readable way. This was not updating. It took me and another guy an hour to figure out where the script was that does this push. I now have it written in my notes. It tuned out to be a pretty obvious spot. It was just a matter of running through the fifteen obvious places.

This is the typical day of the IT person. This is normal. Parts of the network bombing out and having to track down the same switch by hand that was the problem last week is just how it is done. By the time 14:00 rolls around, I'm ready to keel over. I'm there until 18:00.

Now we are talking adding VLAN setup to the mix. VLAN switches are great for limiting traffic. We attempt to do this now via other means. Sometimes things work well. Other times things blow up in our face. VLAN setup is just one more tool in the box. It is not a silver bullet by any measure.