approach towards troubleshooting??

[ommy]

Hi all,
I have a very basic question and hope it would contribute to the community. What would be your approach if an end user comes upto you and tell you that his corporate portal is not working or he tells you that his internet is down

What I would do is:

-- Ping my network gateway to see if its alive
-- do 'nslookup/dig' to see if name servers are doing their job
-- will do a 'tracert -d to corporate_portal' and see where it drops out

Well, that was my approach.Wondering, how would a geek look into these sort of situations, when he do not have access to the webserver hosting the corporate portal, does not have access to any proxy/NAT-ing device. How would a geek look into all this being on the client side with almost no administrative previliges to the server machines.

I would appreciate, if you people could list down any further utilities which gives you more freedom and liberty to diagnose the problem. (may be something like Hping).

Your input on this will be considered a great help. Looking forward to it.

[Und3ertak3r]

there is one thing that has been missed.

ASK A QUESTION OR TWO..
like: is this the only PC with the problem, is it All the pc's on the network or just a group
be very careful when approaching a problem assuming too much..

edit

[BrainStop]

Hi there,

his corporate portal is not working

When a user reports that a particular site is not working, it also good to check that he can access other sites.

We have a VPN solution with two access modes at my company. One for email only, the other for access to our complete Intranet. We sometimes get users complaining that they can't access a particular site on the Intranet, only to find that they are using the email only VPN.

From a troubleshooting perspective, you are taking the right steps. Always try to narrow down the possibilities. One thing to check as well can be the hosts file of the user's PC ... who knows what might have gotten in there.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Cheers,

BrainStop

[IKnowNot]

... tell you that his corporate portal is not working or he tells you that his internet is down
What I would do is:

-- Ping my network gateway to see if its alive
-- do 'nslookup/dig' to see if name servers are doing their job
-- will do a 'tracert -d to corporate_portal' and see where it drops out

My question here is, did you do this from your machine or his?

Several admins will probably cringe at this, but after you have checked from your end, walk them through it at their end ( or do it yourself remotely if necessary if you cringed.)

Just my thoughts.

[ommy]

IKnowNot, I do this from several machines, depending upon the criticality of the problem. Anyways 24 hours are about to past and didnt get too much response.

[Dcrypter]

When troubleshoot any networking problem I follow the OSI model
http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp
It sounds crazy but you never know, and its usually the simple things that are missed.