Troubleshooting Networks - CompTIA A+ 220-1201 - 5.5

When you're troubleshooting a network problem, there are a series of steps that can give you a baseline of what might be working and what might not be working. The first thing you might want to check is to see if you have a link light. This is a light that's on the Ethernet connection that you're using.

So, this would be for a wired connection to the network. If you're plugged in and you see a light, then you're at least communicating and sending a signal to the device that's on the other end. If you don't see a light, then you might not have a good connection or you might have a bad cable. You then might want to

ping the loop back address of the device that you're using. So, you would simply ping 127.0.0.1 and see if you get a response back. It may seem odd that you're pinging a device that you're physically sitting in front of, but this is really checking to see if the IP stack that's in your system is operating normally. If

there's any problem with the internal network configuration of your operating system, then you will not receive a ping back from this loop back address. From there, you might want to ping your local IP address. This would be the IP address that was assigned to your device from a DHCP server, or perhaps it's an address

that you configured manually. In either case, you should ping that IP address to see if you get a response. This would verify that you indeed have a link light and you are connected to the rest of the network. Now, let's try pinging a device that is somewhere else on our local network. And since most local networks

have a default gateway, that's a perfect IP address to try. So, check the IP address configuration of your computer where it says default gateway and try pinging that IP address. That will at least confirm that you're able to ping from your device to another device on your local network and receive the response. If all of that is working,