Infrastructure
How level-1 troubleshoots the circuit down calls coming in
Active Directory IP / Machine Naming Schemes
What type of enquiries related to infrastructure that may come in on the Level 1 line or ticketing system?
T1 lines:
Majority of the stores right now their network connectivity is through T1 lines. T1 lines are dedicated Copper connection for our stores to utilize AT&T, our service provider. The Level-1 team will let them know what T1 lines are. T1 line are terminated or demarked somewhere on the campus, wherever their telecommunication is room is, from there they will have an extension of copper or fibre with use of media converters all the way to the store's location. From there they will be a network drop. From there a regular cat5 cable is connected to the routers T1 interface.
SD WAN:
As T1 connection is an older technology and has limited bandwidth, we are moving on to SD WAN which is a faster connection. This service is through AT&T. The good thing about this connection is that it provides more bandwidth and is directly monitored by AT&T.
Broadband:
It can be DSL line coming in or coax cable modem coming in. It is a consumer-based product.
Cellular back up
We do provide cellular back up for our stores, in case the dedicated connection goes down or they don't have a hardware solution. We ship them to the Router, which has 4G cell card in it and we connect that to our switches and all the connection run through the back up cellular connection.
Campus network:
We also check with the campuses, whether they can provide us an ongoing IP address on their network. They provide us with an IP and a physical hand off to connect to our Router.
Mobile/Hotspot/Offsite network:
We do not provide global hotspot to utilize for off-site events. For off-site events there is an application on our COREPOS registers. We use a VPN application, Zscaler, where they can connect to any public network to get access to our Follett network.
Internet/Wi-Fi (Cafes Only)
Some of our stores operate a café, Starbucks. These cafés will use a broadband service provider. Some of these cafés will also provide public Wi-Fi for the customers.
How level-1 troubleshoots the circuit down calls coming in
Here is the documentation that describes what kind of equipment that store might have with what kind of connection. Most of the features are outlined in the below screenshots to describe how the equipment are connected to the switches, and also they can be internally pinned to that particular router.
Trace Route a Router
This is for our Level-1 technicians to run a Trace Route. Our IP structure is "10" based, this means all of our IP address starts with 10. In the case below, this is store number 1301 so 10.13.1.1 it the IP of the Router. Running a trace route on the Router’s IP gives some different types of results and this document shows the updated status about what's going on while doing troubleshooting.
Active Directory IP / Machine Naming Schemes
This document shows what the Follett IP structure is for the stores. If you look towards the right-hand side the "Active Directory PC Naming Structures" column shows how the Naming structures looks like for Servers, Domain Controller, Workstations and Registers. The column “Active Directory IP Network Structure” shows the IP address of the Router, Servers, Switches, Domain Controller, Network Printers, Workstations, and Registers.
*This document is out-dated however is still relevant.
Hub / Switch Setup
Step 1
Step 2
Depending on what kind of Router they have set up of which IP address to ping to determine the connection.
