The Opener
It’s been a few months since the last issue. That’s on me. We’re back.
Here’s something I see all the time, at work and in my comments. Something breaks, somebody runs one test, and that one test becomes the answer. “I can ping it.” “Wi-Fi shows full bars.” “The light is green.” Every one of those can be true while the thing is still broken.
I’m not above it. A couple of weeks ago I tore down my whole home network for a move, and halfway through I realized I couldn’t tell you which port went to which VLAN. Me. The guy who designs networks for a living. I even told you all to take a picture of the back before unplugging anything. I’ll let you guess whether I did.
The people who move up in IT aren’t the ones who know the most commands. They’re the ones who check one more layer before saying “it’s fine,” and then write down what they found. That’s this whole issue.
The Deep Dive: “I can ping it” is where troubleshooting starts
My short this week was about a line I hear constantly: “Well, I can ping it.”
Ping is a good tool. It answers exactly one question: did this address send back a reply? It doesn’t tell you whether the name resolves, whether the right port is open, or whether the app on the other end is healthy.
For a website to load, four things have to go right:
The name turns into an address. That’s DNS.
There’s a path to that address. That’s routing.
The right door is open on the other end. For HTTPS, that’s TCP port 443.
Whatever’s behind that door actually works. The web server, the certificate, the app.
Ping really only tests the second one, and it can fool you in both directions. Plenty of firewalls block ping on purpose, so a perfectly healthy server may never answer. Other times ping works fine while port 443 is blocked or the app is throwing errors.
The four-step check
Run these in order on Windows. Stop at the first one that fails. That’s your layer.
nslookup example.com— Did an address come back? “Non-existent domain” usually means a typo. A timeout means your DNS server isn’t answering, so start there.ping 203.0.113.10(the address nslookup gave you) — Ping the IP, not the name, so you’re testing one thing at a time. A reply rules out a lot. No reply isn’t proof of anything by itself.Test-NetConnection example.com -Port 443(in PowerShell) — Look for TcpTestSucceeded. False with a working ping usually means a firewall or a dead service.Read the browser’s actual error. A certificate warning, a 502, and a timeout are three different problems, often owned by three different teams.
On a Mac, steps 1 and 2 work the same, and nc -vz example.com 443 covers step 3.
One gotcha: nslookup asks your DNS server directly and skips your computer’s local cache and hosts file. So nslookup can look perfect while your browser is stuck on an old answer. If they disagree, run ipconfig /flushdns and try again. Still weird? Check the hosts file. Someone may have hard-coded an old address in there.
Then write it down
This is the part that gets you noticed. Compare these two tickets:
The useless one: Website’s down. I can ping it.
The useful one: Can’t load portal.example.com from my laptop since about 9:40. nslookup returns 10.20.4.15. Ping to 10.20.4.15 works. Test-NetConnection on 443 fails. Browser shows a timeout. The person next to me has the same issue.
The second one tells the next person exactly where to start. That’s probably 30 minutes of their day you just gave back.
The takeaway: if you’re aiming for help desk or a NOC, this is the job. Not memorizing port numbers. Narrowing a problem down to one layer and handing it off clean. Do that consistently and the network team learns your name, which is how a lot of people get pulled up off the help desk. It’s also exactly where the CCNA is heading. More on that below.
The Week in Networking
Cisco’s official topic list for CCNA v2.0. The current version’s last test day is February 2, 2027.
Why it matters: v2.0 lists troubleshooting client connectivity on Windows, macOS, and Linux plus diagnosing DNS records. Everything in the Deep Dive is now on the test.
Employers posted 272,040 new IT openings in September, and tech support was the third most-posted role, even as tech-sector jobs dipped by about 10,000.
Why it matters: The door is open. It’s just labeled “help desk.”
A bug during a routine DNSSEC key rollover made most .de domains unreachable through validating resolvers for about three hours in May.
Why it matters: The network was up. The names just wouldn’t resolve. That’s “I can ping it” at the scale of a country.
A legacy config nobody had documented clearly took down Quad9’s own domain for up to about 40 minutes. The 9.9.9.9 resolver kept working.
Why it matters: It’s the professional version of me staring at an unlabeled rack. Write it down.
Reader Question
“I got my CCNA four years ago, renewed it once, and still can’t land a job. Unless you know someone, isn’t it a waste of time and money?”
From a YouTube comment this month, lightly edited into a question.
You’re half right, and the half you’re right about matters.
A CCNA doesn’t get you hired. It never did. It gets you past a filter so a human actually reads your resume. What gets you hired is evidence you can do the work, plus someone on the other side willing to bet on you.
But “unless you know someone” isn’t luck. That part can be built. If I were four years into this, here’s what I’d check, in this order:
What you’re applying for. If it’s “Network Engineer” with a cert and no IT job history, that’s the gap. The realistic doors are help desk, desktop support, NOC, and field tech. Not glamorous. They’re the doors.
Whether your resume shows work or just letters. One real project you can explain beats a second cert. Rebuild a small network for a family business or a church, document it, and put that write-up on your resume.
Who has seen you work. “Knowing someone” usually starts as someone remembering you explained a problem clearly. Post what you fixed on LinkedIn. Show up to a local meetup. Ask the IT person at your current job if you can shadow them for an afternoon.
And don’t spend your next dollar on another cert. If the cert isn’t what’s blocking you, more certs won’t unblock you.
The Close
Next week: documentation, the most underrated skill in IT, and the bare-minimum version that would have saved me from my own rack. Want the short versions in the meantime? I’m @adjacentnode on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Got a question you want answered here? Hit reply, and it might be next week’s Reader Question.
The Weekly Packet by Kevin Nanns
Enterprise network architect. Content creator. adjacentnode.com