basic car care

[tonythompson]

say you have a 2524 router hooked up to a t1 that talks frame...

what is the router equivalent of checking the oil and coolant level and the tire pressure? your goal is to verify that the router is basically healthy and operating normally with a good connection to a telco circuit...

assume that the person doing the checking is rather slow-witted, and he is so inexperienced he holds his breath every time he telnets to the router because he's afraid to do something stupid and knock out the connection... the enable prompt makes his hands tremble....

however, he can read, and he can follow simple instructions that are at a "see dick run, see spot run" level.....

mtia...

[edmonds_robert]

I would have him do a couple of commands like show interface serial 0 and look for thing like interface resets and a high number of errors and drops. Show frame-relay commands would give you information specific to the frame network.

If you're really concerned about him messing something up, give him a seperate logon with a lower privilege level and then assign the commands to which you want him to have access.

[tonythompson]

thanks robert. unfortunately, the dull wit is yours truly, so a separate logon would only get me so far...!

occasionally me and the telco have a showdown when something is wrong with the circuit and they say it is fine, but i am sure our end is fine, etc... so in that event i would like to be able to point to something and say with some confidence: that router is working fine - it's your problem....

many thanks for taking the time to reply... cheers. and if you are from montgomery co. md, welcome back to regular society!

[ahbanks · Accepted solution]

When the telco claims the circuit is fine, but nothing is working, I would do the following:

NOTE: I am making up the interface numbers. Substitute where appropriate.

show interface serial 0

This command should show the status as up/up. Other things to look for are errors down near the bottom of the output.

show ip interface brief

This command will give you a quick status of every IP interface on the router. Good for a quick up/up check. Just make sure everything here makes sense.

show frame-relay pvc

This command will show you all PVCs configured or learned by the router and their status. Any status like deleted, unused, etc. is not good.

show frame-relay lmi

This command will show information about LMI. Essentially, you are looking for few timeouts, and seeing that LMI is arriving from the carrier.

That is a start on troubleshooting. One item that I always like for people to have around is a loopback plug - that lets the carrier run tests separate from your equipment.

[tonythompson]

that's great stuff - many many thanks...