Cynthia runs a small home business, in which she develops online courseware for a variety of customers. Some of those customers contract with her to come into their local facilities and teach these courses face to face. Her two sons, Ben and Jerry, enjoy laptop wireless connections to their home network, which supports a wired set of connections to a family RAID server and a movie server. The servers require usernames and passwords to access, as does the modem and router (WPA protected). A Western Digital WDTV box finishes off their customer side of the interface. The local ISP provides the gateway device, which for about two years was a cable modem connection, 8 MBps downlink. All wireless users routinely show a 54 Mbps connection to the wireless router. Wired connections are all Cat5 / Cat5E, 100 Mbps. Her systems Network Map looks something like what you see here.

As often as once a week, Cynthia finds that she has to do a hard reset on either the ISPs modem gateway, on her router (a Belkin Pre-N 80154), or both. These are accomplished by the Brute Force Cybernetics school method of unplugging their DC power supplies, waiting half a minute, then plugging them back in. Once these tasks are done, network throughput goes back where it ought to be. Since this seemed to take care of things, it became part of the weekly routine system maintenance activities.

Then, Cynthia, her boys, and her business moved to a new waterfront condo, one with fiber optic connections for landline phone and Internet. She chose a 50 Mbps downlink / 10 Mbps uplink service plan.

Patterns of usage havent really changed; they dont watch that many more movies at home or on the Net, a few MLB.TV games during the playoffs, but once a week, they still have to hard-reset the darned router and modem.

MGMT 393 Laboratory Manual Last Updated: August 2016 Activity 7.2 Page 2

Cynthia knows youre a smart network specialist. She asks you about this. Is this normal, a part of doing e-business? Whats causing the problems? How can she eliminate this need to reboot the hardware? And how does she know its