Frequently Asked Question

How to Trouble shoot WAN ?

To eradicate obstacles and monitor the WAN–based application is an emerging business nowadays, large numbers of products and solutions are available to fulfill the requirements of the enterprises and small business. As it is well described in the previous section that WAN links are usually built-up through the leased lines, circuit switching and packet switching methods and other WAN technologies.One of the easiest way of troubleshooting every type of network is done through the free utility which is built in every TCP/IP stack. The first step in troubleshooting is to use the “PING” command.

Using Ping Command

Go to run

Type CMD

Press enter

Go to command prompt and at the command prompt type ping [IP address] where the IP address is the 32 bit numeric address of the destination computer like 10.11.10.1.

Once you have followed the same steps as written above and you get the reply from the remote computer this means that physical connection between the two computers has been made and if you get the error message of “Request Time Out”, it shows that there is some problem in the connection.

The most common problems occur due to faulty network devices such as LAN card, router,switch, misconfigured router, misconfigured firewall, too many simultaneous connections, server crash down, network congestions and inadequate bandwidth problems.

To isolate the root cause of the WAN problems is very essential and this can be achieved by using the right troubleshooting tools and right troubleshooting techniques. The tools can help us determine the nature of the root cause of the problem.

The technologies and products which are available for troubleshooting and optimizing the WAN performance are rapidly evolving. Before troubleshooting the problem it is the best approach to divide the components of the WAN.

Following are some basic tips that can help you in determining and isolating the problems in your WAN network.

• First of all assure that the network cards settings are correct on each computer.

• After that check it out that the cables on the routers are tightly plugged.

• After checking the cables turn off your router for almost 30 seconds before starting again.

• The most important step is to ping the WAN IP address of the remote router.

• After pinging the WAN IP address turn on all the network devices such as switches and routers.

• Another most important thing is to apply the techniques of local loop testing, framing, clocking, signaling and signal encoding.

• Bandwidth allocation much be checked inorder to see how much bandwidth is allocated to each remote site.

• By using WAN troubleshooting tool check if it is a genuine WAN problem, network jamming due to the distributed application or bandwidth problem.

• Find it out if someone is sending large amount of data.

• Searched it out if there is a fault in the remote routers/switches or centralized router/switches.

• Do confirm the correct configuration of firewall software or firewall hardware.