Charles Pluta – IT Service Integration

Project 52 – Week 3

Troubleshooting a problem can be tedious and time consuming. However, with the right process, you can turn a drawn out troubleshooting process into a more concentrated point of observation. As an example, this week I was setting up a single VPN tunnel, however it connected 2 offices to a single 3rd party office. This was done via a point to point connection between the 2 offices of my client.

The equipment being used included 2 TZ170 Sonicwalls for my client, one at each site, and a Cisco PIX firewall for the 3rd party. I had no control over the Cisco device, but full control over the Sonicwall devices. I had the VPN tunnel setup for the 1st hop fairly quickly. We agreed on a preshared key and had the one office setup almost immediately. However, the 2nd office (over the point to point connection) could not get access into their network.

This is where I began my troubleshooting process. The easiest way I troubleshoot something like this is to break it down piece by piece, and in this case, hop by hop (The Sonicwalls are also routers). I enabled logging on both devices and watched as we attempted to ping from both networks. On one network, everything was being sent fine. However, pings from the point to point network were being sent, but nothing ever was being received. At this point I was happy that it seemed both of my devices were working properly. However, their network was not responding to anything I sent.

After several conversations over almost a week-long period, the 3rd party finally admitted to having entered the IP information incorrectly in their PIX device. Once this was resolved everything was operating as needed.

My point is how to break things up so you have an idea where to look at. I could have fired blindly and started making changes that I though could have fixed the issue, but by breaking it down first and peering into what was happening on a step by step basis, I was able to pinpoint where the problem was, and then once realizing where it was, how to fix it.