Sams Teach Yourself Network Troubleshooting in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Hour 7. The SOAP Method: Structured Analysis

The road to wisdom?

Well it’s plain

and simple to express:

Err

and err

and err again

but less

and less

and less.

——Piet Hein

I hope you’ve liked all the note taking involved in the last hour because the method of troubleshooting in this hour involves a great deal more of it.

Treating a complex problem usually involves a lot of note taking because you have to fill in the gaps where your understanding of the problem is incomplete. Up until now, you’ve treated problems the way you treat a multiple-choice test—with change analysis, divisive reasoning, and matching. Now, we’re talking about a fill-in-the-blank test, and it gets a little bit harder; this is the hour in which you have to wade through the ...