Simple Troubleshooting Advice....

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Zeon

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#107627 15-Aug-2012 11:14

Hey guys,
Thought I'd share a story with you from last week. I was helping a customer switch to VOIP. As part of that they needed to switch to a new DSL provider who does naked (Unleash in this case), port their numbers to World Exchange and install an IP module for alarm monitoring. Their wiring is a complete mess of stuff being tacked on which in itself is another problem. They have a Draytek 120 going into PFsense.

Anyway DSL moved across fine so no problem there. It just so happened that the guy from AlarmNZ came to do the IP module on the day and very time the numbers were ported. So the Alarm guy did his thing and the internet stopped working although the DSL light was on. I thought ah must be to do with the number porting as that was happening around the same time. Things didn't come right and I started to worry since they were moving to VOIP and needed internet.

So after 2 hours I rang the ISP who logged a ticket with Chorus. Double checked the wiring with the alarm guy etc. as perhaps the phone went through there. All the time the DSL light was on. After another 30 misn of checking and going through the ISP check list it had the obligatory turn on-off. I thought yea not going to do anything but did it and everything came right!

Goes to show the simple things are always worth trying!

Post your stories of overlooking stupid things when troubleshooting!

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ChevronX

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#672733 15-Aug-2012 11:24

There is always the time I thought a power supply was faulty when the power cable was actually unplugged...

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freitasm

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#672764 15-Aug-2012 12:16

Zeon: After another 30 misn of checking and going through the ISP check list it had the obligatory turn on-off. I thought yea not going to do anything but did it and everything came right!

Surely you didn't waste everyone's time?

insane

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#672767 15-Aug-2012 12:18

Spent about 20 minutes scratching my head trying to get a clients two new VPNs to work using the same config as another existing one, only to find out that the existing one wasn't actually working :)

I'll leave the more embarrassing stories untold :)

DonGould

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#672770 15-Aug-2012 12:26

Oh I don't think it's a waste of time to share a war story or two on a rainy day....

Zeon I so agree...

I think it's important to keep non tech peoples expectations on how to fix stuff in line.

I was trying to set up v6 tunnels the other week and it just wouldn't go. Well following a power cut everything just worked. This tells me that all the commands were there in the config, just something had got confused in the say I executed them to start the tunnel and clearly the network was just in a state of confusion with all my changes.

I was reading about stateless configuration and I see this sort of stuff coming at us like a freight train. We're going to have to cold start an entire home/office etc, just to push in a small change.

This is not new though. CityLink couldn't control the BGP in their network a while back after a black out and had great trouble getting systems back on line. This because different network parts would see a state change and panic.

Telstra had the same sort of issues with some gear they bought a decade ago on their DSL network in Australia. The BRAS was rated for 20k connections but would fail after 2k. So because modems would reauth when the BRAS came back online, it would just crash as soon as it restarted.

I recall back when NEAX64's were new. They would load shed between units and cause load to spike and crash them. This would then just take units off line one after another as a failed node would dump load on a running one, at least that's how the story goes.

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DonGould

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#672774 15-Aug-2012 12:31

insane: Spent about 20 minutes scratching my head trying to get a clients two new VPNs to work using the same config as another existing one, only to find out that the existing one wasn't actually working :)

I'll leave the more embarrassing stories untold :)

I don't actually consider that to be embarrassing....

From my pov, you'd use an existing config to save time and hopefully save the client some gold, and free yourself up to help the next client.

If you'd done a config from scratch then chances are you'd have made a mistake which you'd find in testing, but time still mounts up.

We have to make assumptions.

I don't see how making a wrong assumption should be embarrassing. I'd be embarrassed if you didn't make normal bast practices type assumptions, claimed you did and then got caught out making false claims.

To err is human... to completely stuff it up takes a computer (or a political leader ;) )

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Jaxar

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#673817 17-Aug-2012 18:56

Cutest example I've ever seen of this:

Puppy ate the ethernet cable.

Please note: I have a professional bias towards Vodafone.