Troubleshooting Server IP Address Not Found Error

It is Sunday morning, and you are the on-call tech for the weekend. Your phone rings and a user informs you that no matter what website they attempt to navigate to, be it an internally hosted websites or external public website they receive the error “Servers IP address could not be found”. You have a single Primary DNS server (LINUX) also configured to perform DNS forwarding to your ISP DNS server providing name resolution of entries not contained in your zone files.

You have three subnets on your network, a server subnet and two user subnets. For security purposes your desktop VLANS are routed through a firewall before reaching the server subnet

You have full SSH/RDP capabilities to your Servers and Clients on the network. Before making the trip to the office you want to try and resolve the issue from home. You need to begin troubleshooting the issue to determine what the issue is and where the issue resides.

Questions are

Provide five troubleshooting steps that you can perform to begin diagnosing the cause of the error message for the user. These steps can be questions you would ask the user, things you could ask the user to do, things you could do. For each step you would perform provide a rationale.