Your job is to keep the network up and running, so employees can work without interruption and so that you can get home at a reasonable hour. The problem is that things don't always go the way you want them to go. Some days just plain stink. There are many reasons, but we'll just stick to the 10 most commonly encountered network management  potholes.

1. Using interruptible UPSs.

One shop was squeezing the last life out of its system. The elderly server could barely keep up with the demands of the shop, and management refused to even update the battery in their UPS, something that should be done every couple of years.

One day there was a power outage. The UPS was so old that it could not control the server in a safe power down. The battery had lost so much of its power that it too went quickly. As a result, the RAID controller failed, bringing down the server.

The shop was 100% dependent on this server for daily operations and transactions. It took three days to recover the server, and it took the company much longer to recover the lost revenue. A $75 battery would have prevented the failure.

2. Not packing a kitbag.

The call came in to corporate headquarters saying the server was down in a branch office. The network administrator flew out of his office to help. After driving for an hour, he rushed into the server lab and dove into the problem. He found a section of corrupted operating system files. All he had to do was reinstall the operating system. The onsite network administrator had no idea where the CDs were. No problem, the visiting administrator had a set he could use - back at his office an hour away, two hours round-trip.

Pack a kitbag and leave it by the door (or in your car). Everything you might need, from copies of every operating system in use by your users to a roll of duct tape, should be in that bag. This is simple to do, costs little and can mean the difference between updating the operating system and updating your résumé.

3. Failing to patch.

A toy manufacturer had file connection problems on its server. The situation degraded to the point where staff members lost all access to their files, and manufacturing stopped for two days. Revenue losses were skyrocketing. The newly hired network administrator stepped up to solve the crisis. He quickly found that the previous administrator had not installed patches since the server was installed three years earlier. The problem the manufacturer had was a known issue that had been resolved two years earlier by one of the patches.

Patch kits are free. While they might be a bit unwieldy, they are generally pretty simple to deploy. Any system administrator could have done it. Apparently, the departed administrator had said that because the system was running fine, there was no need to patch.

4. Making bad "good" backups.

A medical office's server that held medical documents and patient history crashed. Office operations ceased because no information could be accessed. The network administrator immediately grabbed a copy of the last good backup and prepared to rebuild. Her heart sank when she found that the tape was empty. She checked the others: blank.

She checked the office logs and found that her staff had been changing tapes every day for two years, but they were put into a server that had no back-up software because no one had ever loaded the software. The tape drive wasn't even connected internally. No one knew that the backups were no good because they never checked. They had never even done a test restore. They just changed blank tapes for two years.

After two days of work, she salvaged the database, but the office lost a huge amount of money. Any onsite database administrator easily could have prevented the problem with a simple back-up check. They are doing this now. Daily.

5. Not using a licensed cabling guy.

A bank's network was failing constantly. An inspection of the phone closet revealed a bird's nest of wires of different sizes, shapes and lengths. Additionally, the cabling guy had jammed RJ-11 and RJ-12 voice plugs into the many RJ-45 sockets in the patch panels. Not only were the connections poor, but they were falling out constantly. To remedy the situation, the cabling guy had jammed toothpicks in each socket to hold the connectors in place.

Many network problems can be traced to improper cabling. Be sure to have cable installed by a licensed, bonded and insured cabling contractor.