Failures: Failure and Entire Network Shutdown

Companies and businesses communicate with one another internally and with customer externally each day using different methods of technology but at the basis of this is the network, which makes it all possible to interact with one another. Companies and businesses have two types of systems they can set up to carry this out. They can design and set up a centralized system or a distributed system. The important factor no matter what the system is they have to be prepared for failures, which may occur in either system and have procedures in place to identify and isolate these failures to prevent an entire network shutdown and implement a solution for their network.

Failures can occur at any level of a network and the network admin must be prepared in the wake of these occurrences. There are varying types of centralized systems that businesses can implement.

The types of failures that can occur in centralized systems are; network failures, omission failures and halting failures. These types of failures occur when a process crashes due to communication link failures that are detected during timeouts or in the process of sending messages.

These failures typically only occur in the centralized system if it is connected via a general purpose or multi-user network setup.

A distributed system simply is a group of “dummy” devices or computer that are connected to one network of distributed hardware which allows the devices to talk or communicate to one another and share other network assets and resources.

This type of network is susceptible to four types of failures once they are set up. A fail stop occurs with some kind of notification to other components. A network file server telling its clients it is about to go down is a fail-stop. Halting failures occur when a component just simply stops. The only way to detect this type of failure is by a timeout an example of which is when you computer freezes. The device stops responding to requests.

A network failure also can occur when network links break at some part of the process of traffic flow. Finally mission failures occur when there is a fault in the sending and receiving of messagesdue to lack of buffering space. This can lead to a device such as a router becoming overloading due to discarding of messages without notification to either the sender/receiver.

Once these failures have been detected utilizing network research methods the next step in the process is to repair or fix the occurrence. These fixes can range from quick to time consuming, as each failure requires a different set of troubleshooting techniques. The simplest failure to repair is the network line break. The network admin would need to try and reach another device from the broken PC or device by utilizing the ping command to verify if the request was fulfilled which receiving a successful reply back from the device does. If the device fails to respond the admin would check other steps such as changing the network cable, configuration of the IP address or the network interface card.

We typically solve the halting failure daily on our personal computer or our work device when it freezes. We typically use the ESC function or the Task Manager in Windows or the “kill” function in Linux to end an unresponsive process or we restart the device.

Although we can’t always predict when a network failure will occur we can be ready to repair it in a timey manner by having diagnostic steps readily available when a failure is detected to prevent network assets being down for long periods of time.