In a perfect world, network administrators would be free to work solely on the network components
of the system, and the end systems would be taken care of by someone else. The reality
is that we do not live in such a place, so network administrators frequently must help troubleshoot
problems on the end systems. The assistance provided may be simply checking connectivity,
or it may involve the complete rebuilding of the end system! We are not going to get into
the rebuilding of a Windows server from scratch. In this section, you will see how to diagnose
what is happening on an end system, and how to take some simple corrective actions when they
are needed.
In addition to running these commands directly, you can also have the end user run many of
these commands for you and tell you the results. This can be very helpful, especially when the
users are located in a remote location.
Some of the commands examined in this section are variations of the ones used in creating
the end-system documentation; others are new. But before we look at how to identify and correct
problems, we will spend a little more time on how to approach the problem.