Scenario
Kerry finishes his morning pre-work logins, and at 7:59 am the Customer Ticket task screen comes into view. The first task request is from 6:45 am. The VP of Marketing, Todd, indicates no connection to the Internet, email, file services, etc. He cannot even login. He says that the data link light on his machine is blinking green. He wants you to jump on this right away as he has a report due at 8:30 that he needs to print and is not accessible. Kerry has less than 20 minutes to resolve this, so he picks up the phone and calls Todd's office.
Kerry: "Todd, got your message. I need you to work with me for a minute so we can get this resolved by 8:30. Do you have a moment?"
Todd: "I've had a whole hour of moments since 7:00 am. What do you want me to do?" Todd sensed the irritation in Kerry's voice.
Kerry: "I understand. Do you know how to access a DOS command prompt?"
Todd: "Sure, here we go. Yep, it's up. What now?"
Kerry: "Type the following letters, spaces, i p c o n f i g, then a space and / a l l and tell me what you see."
Todd: "Done...looks like I have IP Address 169.254.70.88."
Kerry: "Great, can you also tell me what the Physical Address is?"
Todd responds.
Kerry: "Thanks, Todd. I will get back to you soon. By the way, do you know if anyone else is having issues on your floor?"
Todd: "Until the last few minutes, I was the only one here, but I don't hear any complaining at the moment. Oh, just so you know, I was having a problem on late Friday just before I left for the weekend, and I reported it. I don't know if it was fixed."
Kerry hangs up the phone and remotely logs into the DHCP server. He sees that the scope database has issued a number of valid IP Addresses in the last several minutes, including some that belong to Todd's subnet. He recalled Todd saying that he had a green link light so the physical layer is probably okay. Todd goes back to the Customer Ticket system and looks at the Friday ticket resolution log. Sure enough, it indicated that Todd's Network Card was replaced, the green light was up, and the ticket closed.
Kerry thinks for a moment and logs into the switch for Todd's subnet. What could Kerry be looking for?
After reading the scenario, respond to the following prompts in your discussion post:
- Discuss some possible causes for the symptoms being experienced.
- What is most likely the issue?