[MUSIC PLAYING]
ROB: Hi, I'm Rob.
CANDICE: And I'm Candice.
ROB: Congrats on making it through this course.
Now that you've made it this far,
we're here to give you a sneak peek
into what an interview on the technical subjects covered
by this course might look like.
CANDICE: We hope this will help you
have a better idea of what to expect in your next interview.
Just remember to keep learning and keep practicing.
ROB: All right, so for this scenario,
let's say that you're working helpdesk for a global company
and you get a call first thing in the morning
from a user in a remote office.
They sound panicked, and they tell you
that the network is down in their office.
What do you do?
CANDICE: I would assure the user that I'll
be able to help them out, and then I
would also want to know the network outage symptoms.
So are you receiving an error message?
ROB: Yeah, let's say that I just opened up my laptop,
and I tried to access one of our internal websites,
but I get an error message, and it says,
"page can't be displayed."
CANDICE: Do you know of any other users
who are having this issue?
ROB: You know, I'm not sure.
It's first thing in the morning, and I'm the first one here.
CANDICE: OK, can you actually give me
the name of the website?
I would like to test it out on my computer.
ROB: Sure.
The URL for the internal website is intranet.companyx.com.
CANDICE: OK, thanks.
I'm going to test that out.
ROB: All right, and let's say that it loads up fine just
for you.
CANDICE: OK, so now I want you to try out an external website.
So maybe try google.com.
ROB: So I get the same result on google.com-- page
can't be displayed.
CANDICE: OK, what OS are you using?
ROB: Let's say I'm using Windows 7.
CANDICE: OK, so I want you to navigate to command prompt.
So a way you could do that is just going
to start menu and search "cmd."
ROB: So let's say I launch that.
I have my black command prompt window open.
CANDICE: OK, so now can you run the command ipconfig/all?
ROB: I do that, and I see a bunch of things.
I see IP address, default gateway, DNS,
and I'm a curious user.
So can you explain to me what all those things mean?
CANDICE: Yes, so IP address is a unique numerical address
given to computing devices to communicate on the internet
to other computers.
Default gateway serves as a access point
that's used by computers to store information
to another computer or on an internet.
So that can be like a router.
DNS is domain name system, so that translates domain names
into IP addresses.
ROB: OK, great.
So let's say I read you all this info,
and I tell you my IP address is 192.something.something.
But you know that our network only
uses addresses in the range of 172.something.something.
Does that mean anything?
CANDICE: Yeah, so does this machine use DHCP?
ROB: It does, but since you brought that up,
can you explain to me what DHCP is?
CANDICE: Yes, so Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
automatically assigns IP addresses to computing devices,
and it can also send network configurations too.
ROB: And why would that be important in this scenario?
CANDICE: So this would be important
just because if the IP address is getting assigned statically,
then we have to go in and change it,
but it should be getting assigned automatically.
ROB: All right, so back to our scenario--
what are some reasons I might be getting the wrong IP
address from DHCP?
CANDICE: DHCP can be configured incorrectly,
or you could be connected to the wrong network.
ROB: So let's start with a more simple explanation.
How can we check what network I'm connected to?
CANDICE: Do if you're connected to a wired or wireless network?
ROB: I'm on my laptop, so I'm on wireless.
CANDICE: OK, so if you're on wireless,
let's go to the bottom right corner
and click on the Wi-Fi symbol, and then
go into network preferences, just
to see what network you're actually connected to.
ROB: All right, and when I do that, you're right.
I'm connecting to some random network across the street.
And once I switch back to our corporate wireless,
it seems to solve the issue.
I guess the network wasn't down after all.
Good job.
In this scenario, we saw a great example
of asking clarifying questions.
The problems started with the user
saying that the network was down,
but that can actually mean many things.
It's important to figure out what
exactly is going wrong before we start trying to fix things.
We also saw a few examples of having
to explain the terms we used during the interview.
If you use a term like DNS or DHCP,
it's important that you know what it means
and how it might be relevant.
That's it for now.
See you again at the end of the next course.
SPEAKER: Congratulations on finishing this lesson
from the Google IT Support certificate.
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