From the course: CompTIA Network+ (N10-009) Cert Prep

Troubleshooting cabling, part 1

From the course: CompTIA Network+ (N10-009) Cert Prep

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Troubleshooting cabling, part 1

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- So I have here another structured cabling setup. I have my patch panel, my wall plate, my switch, and my pc. And sometimes the network can go down. Now when the network does go down, the last place you want to look is the structured cabling system, but it does happen and it will be covered in another episode. There are three areas in the structured cabling system that we have mentioned. You have the work area, the horizontal cabling, and the equipment room. So for now we're going to focus on the work area. So here I am in my Windows 10 system and as we can see in the bottom right indicated here, I have no internet connection. I'm not connected. So we will go to our friend control panel. I like typing it in the search. And we are going to go over to Network and Sharing Center. So under our active networks, this would normally show any active networks. And it says, "You're occurring not connected to any networks." Another thing you might want to try and check is the link light on the network card on your computer and the switch as well. So if you have a solid light that shows you have connectivity and blinking means you have some sort of activity going back and forth. If you have no link light, that could be another indicator that your patch cable is probably bad. Another thing that we can try is going into Device Manager. Yes, of course. And making sure that our network card is not disabled. If it were, you would see a down arrow next to our ethernet adapter. Okay, one more thing that we can try and do to verify connectivity is we can also use the loopback address. The loopback address is something that is not commonly used so much anymore, but the CompTIA network plus exam expects you to know this. The loopback address is 127.0.0.1, and the way this works is you would plug what's called a loopback adapter into where your patch cable would normally go and you would ping the address. But again, this is not the most common way to do it, but you're expected to know the address. I'm just going to show you a quick demonstration of this. So if I were to ping, and I'm getting a reply, which indicates that everything is fine with my network card. So again, loopbacks are not that reliable anymore because, what it basically does is that it just sends a single and it just bounces right back to itself. So unless you're using some specialized network card and not the one that's built into the motherboard, it's going to come with all sorts of other apps and they're usually pretty expensive. Some other things to understand is that when cleaning crews come in or patch cables are not run properly, you see this a lot, I remember back when I was working as a a technician, you'd walk in some classrooms and you would see wires like on the floor, they're not under like wire like protection areas, and you'd see them, all the wires are free. That's because when cleaning crews come in sometimes and their using vacuum cleaners and things like that, well, wires can get damaged. Another thing that can happen is the connection to the actual wall plate. So what happens is sometimes, you know, again, whether it's a ignorant technician or it's a cleaning crew that has to move wires out of the way, they'll just simply start yanking at this wire. And what can actually happen is that the wire can do damage on this end, or it could damage on the other end of the wall plate. In which case, what you'd have to do is just get another RJ45 connector and you'd have to punch it back down and install it back into the wall plate. So in conclusion, basically what we want to say is that you want to understand that you always want to make sure that you check the work area first. You don't want to go rushing into the network closet and start messing around with the patch panel and the switches and start possibly unplugging things like that because that can cause, what we call in the industry, a bad thing.

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