Network troubleshooting interview questions
A practical network interview gives you a symptom and asks you to reason with incomplete evidence.
Ask for the missing context
Which users are affected? Which service? When did it last work? Does the same destination work from another source? These answers narrow the investigation before you touch configuration.
Make each command earn its place
Say what your observation would support or rule out. A route lookup answers a different question from a service-specific packet probe.
Explain the blast radius
Propose a small change, a rollback, and a verification plan. Restoring one flow is incomplete if the fix disrupts another team or removes a security boundary.
The missing way home
Austin service network. Independent north and south core paths connect the ingress and egress routers. Requests reach both service networks, but the second client subnet cannot receive replies. The first client subnet still works. Investigate the two service networks from R1: 10.201.224.0/24 to 10.201.234.0/24 (TCP/443), and 10.201.225.0/24 to 10.201.235.0/24 (TCP/8443).
Link addressing (6)
- R1 R2
10.201.240.0/30 - R2 R3
10.201.241.0/30 - R2 R4
10.201.242.0/30 - R3 R5
10.201.243.0/30 - R4 R5
10.201.244.0/30 - R5 R6
10.201.245.0/30
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