ou are a network administrator for a medium-sized company. One morning, you receive reports from several employees in the marketing department that they are unable to access the company's internal marketing database. The database is hosted on a server within your local network. After initial questioning, you determine that the issue is isolated to the marketing department, and other departments are not experiencing any problems accessing the database. You decide to use the top-to-bottom OSI model approach to troubleshoot the issue. Using the top-to-bottom OSI model approach, which of the following steps should you take first to troubleshoot the connectivity issue experienced by the marketing department? ###answer### Ensure that the IP addresses are correctly assigned to the marketing department's computers. Verify the physical connections, such as cables and NICs, in the marketing department. Check to see if the server hosting the database is properly configured at the application layer. Confirm that the switches and routers connecting the marketing department to the server are functioning correctly.

Question

GPT-4o mini · Answer

Using the top-to-bottom OSI model approach to troubleshoot the issue, the first step you should take is to ensure that the IP addresses are correctly assigned to the marketing department's computers. This action falls under the Network layer (Layer 3) of the OSI model, where IP addressing and routing are managed. Since this issue is isolated to a specific department, there may be a problem related to network configuration or addressing for that department’s devices.

Once you've confirmed that the IP addresses are correct, you can move down the OSI model as needed, checking for physical connections (Layer 1), data link issues (Layer 2), and application-related problems (Layer 7) as you further diagnose the issue. Starting with IP addresses is a logical first step before moving on to other potential causes.