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How do you diagnose and troubleshoot issues related to network connectivity between different servers in a distributed environment? Provide an example of a complex issue you faced and how you resolved it.

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Diagnosing & Troubleshooting Network Connectivity Issues in a Distributed Environment:

As an L2 Platform support engineer at Capgemini, my role involves diagnosing and troubleshooting network connectivity issues that arise between different servers in a distributed environment. I accomplish this by following a set of standard steps:

  • Validating the basic network settings, such as IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway of the servers involved.
  • Checking the connectivity between the servers using tools like ping, traceroute, or pathping to identify the point of failure.
  • Analyzing the network traffic using tools like Wireshark, tcpdump, or netstat to identify the congestion or bottlenecks.
  • Testing the application or service specific ports to confirm their availability and response times.
  • Collaborating with network engineers to validate the switches, router, firewall, or load balancer configurations.

Example of Complex Network Connectivity Issue:

One of the complex network connectivity issues that I faced involved an application running across multiple servers in a hybrid cloud environment. The users were experiencing intermittent connectivity issues and timeouts, which impacted their productivity. After analyzing the logs and network traffic, I identified that the root cause of the issue was a misconfigured handshake between the load balancer and the web servers. The load balancer was sending the requests to the wrong server, resulting in a connection failure.

To fix this issue, I worked with the network engineering team to validate the load balancer's configuration and ensure it correctly identified the servers through the application and not just the IP address. We updated the load balancer's configuration to use advanced routing algorithms to balance and direct traffic based on the application domain name, not just the IP address. The issue was successfully resolved, and the application performance improved as a result.

Citations:

  1. Basic Network Troubleshooting Methods:
    https://www.lifewire.com/basic-network-troubleshooting-methods-4148315
  2. Network Troubleshooting Tools:
    https://www.solarwinds.com/network-troubleshooting-tools
  3. Hybrid Cloud Networking:
    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/hybrid-networking/

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