Chapter 20. Recovering from disaster
In your career as a Cisco network administrator, you’re going to encounter some situations where large portions of the network—or the whole network—inexplicably stop working. In the last chapter, you learned some troubleshooting techniques to deal with specific technologies that aren’t functioning.
But when you’re dealing with a disaster scenario, you may not have the luxury of performing in-depth troubleshooting. You need to get the network up and running again, as fast as you can! The goal of recovering from disaster isn’t to get everything back to exactly the way it was; it’s to get everything working as best you can with what you have. To put it in health terms, you’re not trying to win a fitness competition; you’re just trying to get your vital signs within the normal range.
Having said that, the exercises in this chapter are for you to use only as necessary when the needs of your organization demand that you do whatever it takes to get the network up and running. This is one of the last chapters of the book, and the exercises in this chapter are to be used as a last resort.
Here are the basic steps you’ll follow to recover from a disaster: