Fixing corporate resource issues

- [Instructor] There are many corporate resource issues that we have in common. Most corporations and organizations have the same basic server resources and problems accessing them. Of course, there are exceptions as well as some technical companies having custom resources. But this tutorial will get you through the most common ones you can expect as a corporate IT administrator. When it comes to email, one of the things we need to ask ourselves, is email local or in the cloud? If email's local, then you shouldn't have any issues accessing it from say Microsoft Outlook or Outlook on the web. However, if it's in the cloud, we'll need to make sure that we edit DNS to point from our local infrastructure to Microsoft cloud. How are we connected? For email, we can connect internally through our LAN, we can connect wirelessly through Wi-Fi, or we can connect through VPN. We can also connect through MAPI in Microsoft Outlook. Lots of different ways to connect and lots of different ways to fail. There's multiple email protocols besides MAPI. We have Outlook web access or Outlook on the web as it's now called using HTTPS. And we have some legacy protocols such as POP3 and IMAP. Do we have our firewalls properly opened on both our laptops as well as our computers and also on the firewalls themselves if our users are outside the network? And could internal site issues be caused by DNS? For example, if your public domain is also the name of your active directory domain then when users try to connect to email, they may try to connect internally rather than to the cloud if that's where your email's being hosted. So we need to make some changes in order to allow DNS to point the right direction for email. Could our external site issues be caused by an ISP outage? It should be a simple check, but an important one. Where does the connection stop? If we're having routing issues, then it's a good idea to find out where the beginning and where the ending is for our users. Could the issues be caused by DNS, but not internal, could it be caused by public DNS? If our users can't connect internally but they can't connect externally, then we need to look at the public DNS setup. We should also look at IP exhaustion. Many times we have a certain amount of IP addresses in our DHCP scope and those IPs become exhausted and we need to add additional IPs to our scope or set up an additional scope. It could be a computer firewall issue. Not only do we have the Windows firewall to be concerned about, but we also may see a firewall built in by an anti-malware program. And it could be an individual device outage that you just can't get to because it's remote to your location. As IT administrators, we need to be able to connect to devices remotely, but sometimes when those devices go down, we're unable to do so and we'll need to have the computer either shipped to us or we'll need to go to that computer. When it comes to cloud resources, we have a lot of other things that we should also check. Is there a port open to the cloud resource and is it done properly? Then we have VPNs to the cloud resource. Is that VPN down? Many times when we have access to Azure or AWS from our local LAN, we need to set up a special VPN tunnel from our office to those cloud resources. And we need to find out if the VPN tunnel is down that may be causing our issues. Can other resources be reached outside of the cloud? This is one of the things that you'll need to check. If the cloud resources are unavailable but you can reach other resources, say at other vendors, then you'll have to look at your connection to that cloud resource. Video and audio conferencing also has its own set of challenges, such as a lack of connection, or even if you do get connected, you need to be concerned about jittery sound or video. That can make a call go sideways and make it go completely unusable for the user. Is quality of service set up correctly? What this has to do with is if you have a certain amount of bandwidth and it's being used by other services, such as downloading files, social networking, media streaming, maybe you need to set up quality of service so video and audio have some priority. And could you need an ISP upload increase in speed? Most connections are asynchronous, meaning that you're going to probably have a faster download speed than upload speed. So you may need to contact your ISP in order to have that faster upload speed for when you're sending out video and audio. These are some of the most common resources and features that can be disrupted in most organizations. The next step will be to learn how to use the tools that can fix the problems.