Remote access: Only the upper half responds
The incident
Managed remote clients reach access-service gateways over an enterprise transit chain; unmanaged devices use a separate branch. Five metro routers provide two directions around the region before the service handoff. Addresses in the lower half of the primary service subnet fail, while .200 responds. The secondary service is unaffected. Investigate access gateway transport from R1: 10.178.224.0/24 to 10.178.234.0/24 (TCP/443), and 10.178.225.0/24 to 10.178.235.0/24 (UDP/1194).
Your objective
Restore both authorized service transports and return reachability, including clients and service hosts in both halves of the primary subnet. Keep R2 blocked from both service transports, keep SSH blocked to both service subnets, and preserve monitoring between R1 and R4. Do not change physical topology or addressing. These are network forwarding checks, not application-level transactions.
The network
Link addressing (6)
- R1 R2
10.178.240.0/30 - R2 R3
10.178.241.0/30 - R3 R5
10.178.242.0/30 - R5 R4
10.178.243.0/30 - R4 R1
10.178.244.0/30 - R5 R6
10.178.245.0/30
What you’ll practice
Interview exercises are inspired by common industry competencies. They are not proprietary interview questions.