Campus: The port is open for the wrong traffic
The incident
Staff workstations reach the student services platform through the campus distribution layer. Two distribution routers carry separate client, partner, monitoring and service branches. The primary service port appears in the access list, but its required transport is blocked. Routing and the secondary service are working. Investigate student services from R1: 10.163.64.0/24 to 10.163.70.0/24 (TCP/443), and 10.163.65.0/24 to 10.163.71.0/24 (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 R5 blocked from both service transports, keep SSH blocked to both service subnets, and preserve monitoring between R1 and R6. Do not change physical topology or addressing. These are network forwarding checks, not application-level transactions.
The network
Link addressing (5)
- R1 R2
10.163.80.0/30 - R2 R3
10.163.81.0/30 - R3 R4
10.163.82.0/30 - R2 R5
10.163.83.0/30 - R3 R6
10.163.84.0/30
What you’ll practice
Interview exercises are inspired by common industry competencies. They are not proprietary interview questions.