Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 11-05-2007 Installation Manual page 945

be a network problem of some kind. This section introduces a simple check list you
can apply to identify the cause of any network problem encountered.
When checking the network connection of your machine, proceed as follows:
1 If using an ethernet connection, check the hardware first. Make sure that your
network cable is properly plugged into your computer. The control lights next
to your ethernet connector, if available, should both be active.
If the connection fails, check whether your network cable works with another
machine. If it does, your network card causes the failure. If hubs or switches are
included in your network setup, suspect them to be the culprits as well.
2 If using a wireless connection, check whether the wireless link can be established
by other machines. If this is not the case, contact the wireless network's adminis-
trator.
3 Once you have checked your basic network connectivity, try to find out which
service is not responding. Gather the address information of all network servers
needed in your setup. Either look them up in the appropriate YaST module or
ask your system administrator. The following list gives some of the typical net-
work servers involved in a setup together with the symptoms of an outage.
DNS (Name Service)
A broken or malfunctioning name service affects the network's functioning
in many ways. If the local machine relies on any network servers for authen-
tication and these servers cannot be found due to name resolution issues,
users would not even be able to log in. Machines in the network managed
by a broken name server would not be able to "see" each other and commu-
nicate.
NTP (Time Service)
A malfunctioning or completely broken NTP service could affect Kerberos
authentication and X server functionality.
NFS (File Service)
If any application needed data stored in an NFS mounted directory, it would
not be able to start or function properly if this service was down or miscon-
figured. In a worst case scenario, a user's personal desktop configuration
would not come up if his home directory containing the .gconf or .kde
subdirectories could not be found due to an outage of the NFS server.
Common Problems and Their Solutions 927