AstroTech Components, a company that manufactures parts for the aeronautics industry, is having trouble with a network segment in one of its depart-ments. Its IT director has asked you for help. The network consists of 300 workstations using a mix of client OSs and connecting to both UNIX and Windows Server 2003 servers via Ethernet 100Base-T. The department experiencing problems is the CAD/CAM group, which had fought for months to get newer, more powerful workstations. Now that the technicians finally installed the more powerful workstations, however, the users can't access the network. You ask what kind of network they are on, and the IT director says that this group was upgraded to lOGBase-T, along with two other groups, just yesterday, because these users needed the extra speed. When you ask whether all users are affected, she says that everyone—even the department vice president, who has full rights to the network—is prevented from logging on. You suspect that the CAD/CAM users' network access is the problem. What steps do you take next?

a. The first thing I would do is start by the process of elimination. AstroTech has 300 workstations and several departments, however only one of the network segments is having trouble and that network segment just had an upgrade to 10GBaseT So I would thus focus on the upgrade and check the cables and equipment and make sure that the cables used were up to par for 10GbaseT throughput.