Networking Horror Story

There comes a networking job in every technician’s career that truly tests everything that they learned, and makes them feel as if they know nothing. These tests will cause you much stress, head scratching, and undoubtedly be the direct cause of many Google searches on the internet today. This one job in particular was full of surprises, with the customer reporting it to be nothing more than a network problem. Once I arrived however it was much more than that, and a lot of it boiled down to the root cause.

Ok, let’s first go over the basics, this business is roughly the size of half a football field, and many of the customers that came in had problems going online. These customers not being able to stay online complained to management, which forced them to give us a ring and have us come out. Upon first arrival I and my technician were escorted to the server room which consisted of no more than a computer, 2 racks, and a whole lot of cables. I thought to myself, no problem, we will just log into the wireless router set up a password and clean up things a bit. I connected to the open wireless network and proceeded to check my IP, and then I attempted to access the wireless router from Comcast, but It wasn’t letting me in. I turned to my technician and he said he was able to access it when he connected, and that the IP to connect was 10.1.10.1 

After connecting multiple times I finally picked up the Comcast router and successfully logged in and accessed the router. But before I played with the settings I kept thinking as to how weird it was that it took me multiple connections to the wireless access point in order to finally access the router. I asked management if there had been any changes made since the initial setup of the network many months ago, and it was then that I had been told that Comcast had come out and installed their router into their network. “Aha”! I thought to myself, th is tech that came out from Comcast obviously didn’t install the router properly. 

With this new lead I went back to the computer room and I looked at the wiring, and I realized that nothing is labeled. With nothing labeled I don’t know which cable unplugged would knock down the whole POS system which they could not have go down for any length of time. We sat there kind of in shock as to how this was developing. Hours went by, and much troubleshooting was had when we decided to contact the previous techs that had set up the entire network in the first place. When they came in we went straight over to the server room and started troubleshooting. We decided that it was important to know which cables were coming from where, so we had to head up. We went into the ceiling, took down the MAC Addresses of all the equipment installed, and went straight labeling everything.

Now with everything properly labeled, we made the proper cable adjustments, and we set up the networks. All while ensuring that the POS terminals never went down and that the customer knew full well what the situation was. With everything properly networked and setup, we had to go through the process of rerouting and setting up the security cameras which were installed. And with everything properly installed we were able to view the cameras internally on location, and at our office at USA computer store. Although a difficult job, we were able to finish it up completely and within all our projections. Disaster avoided.