Campus: A healthy control plane hides a dropped host
The incident
Staff workstations reach the student services platform through the campus distribution layer. Four routed metro nodes form a ring; the service gateway has a separate handoff. OSPF neighbors and the service /24 route look healthy, but one host at .10 is unreachable. Another host in the same subnet responds. Investigate student services from R2: 10.162.34.0/24 to 10.162.40.0/24 (TCP/443), and 10.162.35.0/24 to 10.162.41.0/24 (TCP/8443).
Your objective
Restore both authorized service transports and return reachability, including clients and service hosts in both halves of the primary subnet. Keep R3 blocked from both service transports, keep SSH blocked to both service subnets, and preserve monitoring between R2 and R1. Do not change physical topology or addressing. These are network forwarding checks, not application-level transactions.
The network
Link addressing (5)
- R1 R2
10.162.48.0/30 - R2 R3
10.162.49.0/30 - R3 R4
10.162.50.0/30 - R4 R1
10.162.51.0/30 - R4 R5
10.162.52.0/30
What you’ll practice
Interview exercises are inspired by common industry competencies. They are not proprietary interview questions.