Summary

This chapter covers quite a bit of ground related to troubleshooting problems you may encounter on your home network. It's important to keep in mind that you really cannot expect to effectively deal with problems unless you have an idea of how things work when all is well. In my experience, when you understand the intended path of a process, you are better equipped to fix a broken component of that process.

It is easy to get caught up in the apparent vastness of something like networking. If you take it a step at a time, though, and break the seemingly larger problem down into more manageable chunks, you can solve as you go along. This chapter describes some of the tools you can use in your troubleshooting efforts. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should be enough to get you started. If your interests take you beyond what is covered here, you can use your favorite search engine to find quite a bit of additional useful troubleshooting information.