Troubleshooting Switch Issues | Switch Project | Decom Switch

hello guys welcome back to the channel and for today's video I will be sharing with you the last part of a switch deployment project or switch upgrade project okay so since this switch project has been a series in this channel I have shared with you the stepbystep process and how we do switch upgrade or switch projects at work from planning to configuration to racking now we have come to the last part which is decommissioning the switch and also dealing with the issues that you have encountered when you have deploy the switch in this video I'm going to show you the last step in switch upgrade or deployment project which is decommissioning I'll also share some tips on best practices to the commission switch I'm also going to share the issues we've encountered during switch deployment and how we resolve those issues with the troubleshooting steps and the commands that we used so if you are interested in today's video please keep on watching and without further Ado let's get started so decommissioning a device in it refers to the process of permanently removing it from the active service and retiring it from the network or infrastructure so decommissioning is probably my favorite part of any projects because it means that the project is almost complete and that you were successful in upgrading a device because you're taking away the old device now which means the new device is now in production it was successfully installed and no more issues were encountered so here's the best practices when you decom a device before decommissioning once the new device was deployed leave it online for a few weeks just in case there's an issue with the new device then after a week shut down the device but send an email to your team first to give them a heads up so here's the example of the email that I've sent to my team of course the subject is to decom the the switch and which location and the message is just brief I'm just letting them know that I'm decommissioning the switch and if there's any objections just let me know before I unrack it so next step is very simple just unplug all the cables connected to it power fiber and also unscrew the mounts and just ask for help if you think that you can't do it by yourself it's always better to be safe and not to damage the rack and the equipments also decommissioning is not just physically removing the devices where it used to be it's also like removing the device from different systems like DNS your inventory removing it there so you can also clean up your assets and of course when you're doing projects it's not always perfect and it's not always smooth as everyone would hope it to be there are times that you'll encounter issues and that is completely normal so don't panic especially if it's your first time doing a switch project or any any other project it's completely normal and that doesn't mean that you didn't do stuff properly sometimes stuff happens and we have no control and whatever issues so it is fine and it also tests our troubleshooting skills on how we will fix those issues so during this switch deployment project that we have been doing at work I have encountered two switch issues so far from different switches and I'm going to share with you how I fixed it and what commands you can use and how to identify the issue how to rule out all the other issues and narrow it down to the root cause of the problem of course there are different troubleshooting methods that we can use but for me personally I always rely on the fundamentals which is the OSI model so there are also different approach in which we can use the OSI model we can do the top down approach which means that you start from the very top layer which is the application down to the physical or you can use the divide and conquer approach where you start in the middle of the OSI model and then based on your findings you can move up or down the OSI deack then the last approach is bottom up where you start from the first layer which is the physical going up to the seventh layer so in the switch issues that I've encountered in this switch upgrade project I'm going to use the bottom up approach because it starts at a physical layer and during the project we are dealing with physically cabling and physically racking the device and it makes sense that we start from the physical level during troubleshooting so let's get started with the issues and let's get started with the easier issue so so the first issue is the server connected to the new Switch isn't working properly and not getting the right connectivity so this was reported by our engineers and they moved the cable back to the old switch and it works there they only moved two cables because the rest of the ports are working on the new Switch Okay so let's go back to our OSI model and let's use the bottom up approach so let's start with layer one or the physical layer so they said that the port is lit when the cables were plugged into the new Switch so that meant that the port itself is working and it has connectivity and also when it was moved back to the old switch everything on the server is working so there's nothing wrong with the cables as well okay so we are done checking the physical layer and we have ruled out that there's nothing wrong with the physical aspect let's now move on to the next layer which is the data link so so this is where we are going to access the switch and check the configuration so next is I'm going to compare the configuration from the old switch because it is working there and to the new Switch and see if there's any difference the easiest configuration that can cause an issue is wrong vlans so I'm just going to compare the old switch from the new Switch and to get this result where you can see the interface and the V lens easily I just typed in the command show and status and you should be able to just compare the old switch configuration to the new Switch so this is where I found out that there's a VLAN mismatch indeed and I had the wrong VLAN on the new Switch and sometimes that happens and that can be skipped or missed so the fix for this is pretty simple just configure the switch port to the correct VLAN by doing this commands and that should fix the issue so for the next issue that I had it the second Port of the switch is not working so this was a tougher one to fix and it took us probably days to resolve this issue even if it was simple in the end so when we re the switches we connect them to the core router on different floors in our building and we use Fiber cable to connect them and that serves as a trunk port to our switch and the issue with this one switch is that one trunk is working and one trunk is not as you can see in here the second trunk is not even lighting up so let's go back to our OSI model and use the bottom up approach and start with the layer one physical layer because the port isn't even lighting up even if the fibers are plugged in and patched in to the core routers so we tried so many fixes and solutions for this until we have narrowed down that it is not the physical issue or we have fixed the physical issue with this so these are the things that we have tried doing so we flipped the fiber cables on the switch and the core router just to make sure that it wasn't a cable issue then we moveed to a different patch panel just to make sure that the patch panel that we have plugged into isn't the issue then you swap the fiber cable with a new one just to make sure that the cable is working then we swap the SFP with a new SFP just to make sure that it is not the issue then we move the working SFP and fiber cable to the non-working port and it's working there so it means that there is an issue with the patch panel or the router that I am connected to on the second Port then we swap the network card on the switch just to rule out that the network card is defective then I asked our Engineers to clean the fiber cables and also to test the connection of the patch panels and make sure that they are working and they even brought these amazing tools with them and they've tested that everything is working so we have tried basically everything that we could and ruled out that there is nothing wrong with the physical layer now we can move on to the next layer which is the data link layer so this is where I checked the router for configuration for the switch ports and see if there is any mistakes or there's any difference so the one on top is the current switch trunk configuration and one at the bottom is the router port configuration and I'm just comparing if there's any difference and see if first if they are both configured as trun Port so this is where I found out that the speed for both the ports are different and that is a speed mismatch and that definitely causes connectivity problems like the trunk Port issue that I'm having because they are different speeds so our Network team is usually the one configuring the router so they have hard set the speed on this instead of doing an auto configuration that's why there's a mismatch so in this case the resolution is to just set up the speed as Auto or if you want to hard set it set it up as matching speed to prevent the issue okay so those were the only issues that I've encountered so far in our switch deployment project if you have encountered issues that I haven't mentioned in this video please do leave a comment down below and describe what the issue is and what the resolution is there'll be nice ni to see other troubleshooting for the switches okay so that would be it for today's video I hope you guys enjoyed watching today's video and you learn something thank you so much for watching and hope to see you guys in the next video

Channel: East Charmer

Views: 4,797

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Id: dcl1LYKQEzY

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024