Network Emergency Action Plan

[dean41]

i have been asked to put together an emergency action plan for when our network goes down (Cable loop or fault device). Does any one have one that i could take a look at.

 

Help would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks

[psydii]

No but basically the standard thing to do is split your lan in half and see if the problem goes away.

If it doesn't, break it in half again. rinse and repeat until you've got to the fault.

 

If it does then the problem is in the other half. Split that in two and reconnect one half to your known good half. Continue until you have isolated the fault.

With two people it should't take more than an hour to get to the point where you have isolated the fault to a single switch.

 

If you've got the tools set up you may be able to short cut this by watching ethernet frames and identifying spurious traffic. You probably will need a list of MAC addresses to identify the source of the fault.

 

For device failure either have a spare switch or a 4hr swap service agreement. In the case of wireless APs you might design the network to have overlapping micro-cells, in the case of single channel WLANs a spare AP is more cost effective.

 

If your controller goes down make sure you can give everybody a network cable to jack in until you can bring it back up (only worth it if you're going to be down for more than a few hours)

 

Servers: Virtualise everything with a SAN. Configured so you can still run everything if you lose a host.

 

But the biggie has got to be have Paper Registers ready at all times.

 

Staff Laptops with Offline Files will minimise the impact the loss of connectivity has during lessons provided they can teach without access to the internet.

 

I would advocate a dry run - perhaps an annual 'no technology day' which gives everybody the opportunity to see how things go.

[Chris_Cook]