Network Contingency and Recovery

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Hello. My name is Dustin and today will be continuing our beginner network infrastructure course with network contingency and recovery. Let's get started.

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So what is Contingency contingency is something that could happen depending on other occurrences. For example, if you apply a patch to all of your writers at once and it ends up breaking the routers, you probably want to have some sort of contingency plan in place to get the network back up and going.

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A good contingency plan should be really easy to follow for even the least experienced person at the organization. You never know who's actually going to be trying to follow and implement or work on that contingency plan. And if you make it too complex or complicated,

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you really run the risk of keeping your network down for an unnecessary amount of time.

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The easier the language and it is to follow the better chance of making at six successful.

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Every contingency plan should answer three questions.

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One. What could happen

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to what to do in case it happens, And three, What can you do to prevent it from happening over happening again?

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The plan should also include a variety of different possibilities and the likelihood of those things happening. Ideally, you'd also want to be keep it prioritized based on what could happen more often, um, than not.

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So let's take a look at this network map real quick and see if we can come up with a really simple and quick contingency plan.

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So if we start at the left, we just got a regular PC connected to a switch, which then follows that connection to the router. Another switch than a firewall and off the firewall. We've got a switch in a server, and then we've got a server router and then the Internet.

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So first thing we want to know is what could happen? What are a few things that could happen? Um, that we should have plans for

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what we do if anything did happen or what to do in case it happens.

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If that thing were to happen,

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what could we do to get things back going, how they should be?

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And lastly, what can you do to prevent it from happening? So if we know something has the possibility of occurring, is there anything we can do before that happens to maybe prevented altogether

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so first off, what are a few things that could happen that we need to be aware of and have plans for

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and just base. Ah, based on this ruling that this real easy network diagram one things that comes to mind to me is it looks like there's only one path.

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If something were to go down,

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you're really gonna have some major issues. There's no redundancy. So if Router one goes down, PC zero is no longer to be able t o be able to connect to the Internet.

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Same with switch three. The firewall switch for rather, too. If any of those devices go down your server, which is presumably a Web server or email server,

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we'll lose all connectivity to the Internet, and that's definitely not what you want.

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So next question what we do if the link between the firewall and switch four went down

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again. You have that inside network activity. But anything outside of that is not gonna work.

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So

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what will we do

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in case that happens

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so really, in this one, it depends on what happened. If one router went down, maybe we'd wanna have a another router that's backed up and configured

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and ready to just swap out. Um, if the line went down, maybe you've got some extra cables laying around with that see, thrown at or fiber, maybe a co axial cable.

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Lastly, what could we do to prevent it from happening?

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And again, In this case, it's pretty simple. There's no redundancy. Um, ideally, you'd wanna have to orm or, um, of most of your your network equipment and have, ah, back up line out. So maybe if you have a old router surrender to is a really old one,

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um, it was from your ice P.

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They haven't upgraded you to new one yet.

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There's a good chance that that may have issues with patching or maybe just a lack of memory or CPU power to process the amount of traffic going in or out. So what can we do to prevent that from happening? One. We could possibly upgrade it

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or to maybe get a secondary connection. Most organizations have two or more connections in case there first or primary Internet provider goes out.

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They won't lose Internet to the whole organization, and that may be something that's a little less expensive to like a slower line or something, but it's something that we can do to prevent that from happening.

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So configurations and backups

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really backups on most network devices? Relatively easy, like we've talked about a lot of the modern devices. Do you have Gu Ys or the graphical user interface, where you just log in, go into your settings back up.

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It will ask you where you want to back it up, whether that sum to, ah, a flash drive, extra hard drive FTP server

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and you let it run.

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If you are using the command line interface, it's usually pretty easy as well. The first step for most network devices is to enter your enable or privilege mode, and you can do that just by typing. Enable.

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Step two would be copying the current configuration from the device

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to your server and links that a lot of times you may have options to back it up to a, um, like file server and FTP server. Maybe just a thumb drive.

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Um, in this case from the command line, we're going to copy it to a T FTP server.

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Command is really simple. Just copy

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running dash config

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t ftp

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colon

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and then hit Enter and lastly for the address or name of the remote host. Um, if you've got a real dynamic network, maybe you want to put just the name of the server in there so it can use DTP to find that Or if you've got something real static, it may be a better idea just after the i P address

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to put it in there.

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And then he hit Enter

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and a last you for the filing and he could name it whatever. Typically, um, it's you dated the current name with a version or a Daytona. So when you go to back it up, you know which file you're backing up

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in. Press enter.

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It will send that file the FDP in the in this case of TCP to our server

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and we're good. So if we need to restore that backup, what can we dio? It's pretty easy. Um, again, from most buoys, you can just upload the file

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and you're good to go.

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In this case, we're gonna do a copy t ftp

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running Dashon thing,

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and again, it'll ask for the address or hosting of the server,

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and then you'll need to enter the file name itself, and you wanna make sure that is exactly how it is. That way you could find it.

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Press enter, and it will restore that configuration.

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Notes. When you do restore from a server, it's important to remember you may need to add it to configuration a little bit and remove any lines beginning with Triple A or capital A. A. That's all the security commands that may lock you out of your your network device. If you didn't have the passwords backed up or anything like that,

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Yeah,

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it's also very important to remember. If you do do that, you you want to make sure you add those back with a new security passwords.