Troubleshooting Workbook

As my lab attempt revealed, my troubleshooting technique isn't as good as I thought it was.  As such I've been going through the Micronics Troubleshooting workbook which was written by Narbik and Dan Shechter.  So far I find it pretty helpful.

It comes with 10 Troubleshooting labs following the Narbik topology,  it ships with two Locklizard PDFs - one is just questions only, and the other with the answers for verification or when you finally give up.  Each lab has around 15 tickets which encompass routers and switches.  Currently I've been allocating myself 2 hours per lab.  Some tickets I can resolve very quickly, others take a bit of time to identify and resolve the problem - it's good though.

Although its a very small thing, I have stopped using Putty Connection Manager and have gone back to untabbed Putty windows with the "Always on top" and "Right Click = menu" which is what the lab environment uses - when I encountered this in the lab I found it a little disconcerting particulary during the troubleshooting when there were on the order of 30 possible devices to work with.  It wasn't the cause of me failing that section, it just help fluster me a little.  Already I am taking this into my workflow and learning to close down sessions that I don't actively require, while a very small thing on the scheme of things.  I think it might give a slight advantage next time I sit the lab (BTW it is possible during the lab to change the settings of Putty but I would rather save those few minutes of terminal configuration to be used for solving tickets)

If you're interested in trying out some of the tickets from the workbook without risking your cash - checkout some of Dan's mini TS Lab tickets to get a sense of the style and the whole of Lab #3 is available for free for you to evaluate.