Check the basics!

I have just spent several hours trying to work out why one particular aspect of a network configuration was not working. I was looking everywhere (or nearly everywhere as will become clear) for the problem and could just not see it.
I was even thinking that there was something fundamentally wrong with my carefully crafted addressing scheme. After banging my head against the brick wall for several hours it was starting to hurt!

Finally just when I was about to give up for the day, I spotted a really basic error in setting up the physical links between two of the routers. (If you are interested, I forgot to set the clock speed on one link). As soon as I put this right, everything started to work properly. I was kicking myself since I am always telling students to check the basics when troubleshooting.

Despite being really annoyed with myself for missing this, there are some positives that I can take away from the experience... The first is that I have looked really, really hard at my addressing scheme and it stood up to scrutiny. Another is that I did get there in the end and proved that the rest of the setup was OK.


And, as has already happened several times on this course, it has reminded me how my students must feel when wrestling with an exercise or assignment. As time went by and I couldn't make it work and was getting more and more tired, I was seriously starting to lose confidence in myself.

I was reminded of a situation when a student was trying to get a particular function of a website working and not getting very far. We had exchanged various emails as they tried to resolve the situation and eventually agreed to meet the next day to see if I could spot the problem. When I checked my email the next morning I found one from the student time-stamped around 2:00am with a subject line along the lines of "Yippeee!". They had persevered and eventually made the breakthrough themselves. At the end of the module, they referred to that episode as one of the positives because they had learnt so much from it!

So, rather a frustrating afternoon but ended on a high!