Troubleshooting WAN involves proper planning and a good resource of network diagnostic, monitoring and troubleshooting tools. The common errors that arise in WAN are connectivity issues, security issues, bandwidth utilization, performance issues, network congestions and the problems due to the faulty network devices. The first step of troubleshooting is to diagnose the problem and isolate it. If the problem is related to the connectivity it can be diagnosed and troubleshoot with a TCP/IP based command named “PING”. Go to the command prompt and type ping “IP address of the remote computer or router”.
If you get the reply from the remote computer this means that the connectivity is okay between the computer computers or routers and if you get the error message like this “request time out” this means that there is some problem in the connectivity. Most of the troubleshooting of the WAN can be done by using the PING tool.
Another approach is to have a good set of the troubleshooting and diagnostic tools such as Packeteer, Network Analyzer, Ethereal, Network Analysis - Prism Family – WAN, GFI LanGuard, Andrisoft WanGuard, NimBUS, VitalNet, ipMonitor, Visual UpTime and WAN monitor etc. These tools are used to analyze, diagnose and troubleshoot the problems in your local and wide area network.
Many vendors offer monitoring software, devices and the combinations of both to check the WAN links and maintain the performance at the peak level. The network monitoring tools pin point the root cause of the disconnection and outage and reestablish the connections. They also produce the network utilization reports, outage stats and other useful information.
After the diagnostic tests, if you find that the problem is related only to one computer then checking the cables, configurations and rebooting the computer can fix the problem.
If the problem is related to all the computers in one site then it is most likely a switch, router or hub problem. Turn off your router for 30 seconds to 1 minute and turn it on again.