16.2. Housekeeping

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor."

—Henry David Thoreau

In Chapter 15, "Switch Management," we discussed network management within your bridged catenet. Network management is very important in ensuring the reliability of the data flow in your network and can be a very effective way to catch a problem before it propagates itself. In addition to utilizing network management solutions, there are some proactive troubleshooting steps that can be taken that will make the job of fixing a problem much easier and less time consuming.

The methods that are discussed in this section are suggestions only and are not requirements. Additionally, you may want to expand this list to fit the needs of the solutions that you have deployed within your network. Considering that a problem may occur at any time and you can never plan the type of issue that you may have next, a good rule to follow is to have as much information as possible about the network on hand and available. It is entirely possible that you will have to bring in other vendors to assist in troubleshooting issues and the more information you can provide up front the better.

16.2.1. Running the Network Baseline

Baseline[] (bās' līn') n.

[] The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth, Fourth Edition. Houghton ...

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