Exercise 2: The Four Scoping Questions — Possible Solution ==================================================================== THE FOUR QUESTIONS, PER THIS CHAPTER ------------------------------ 1. One user, or many? 2. One destination, or everywhere? 3. Total failure, or degraded? 4. Just started, or always broken? QUESTION 1 — ONE USER, OR MANY? ------------------------------ One user affected points toward that user's own machine, credentials, or local network. Many users affected points toward a shared cause - the server itself, a shared firewall rule, or DNS. QUESTION 2 — ONE DESTINATION, OR EVERYWHERE? ------------------------------ Can't reach one specific site/app but everything else works fine narrows the search dramatically, compared to "the internet doesn't work at all," which points much further upstream (their own connection, gateway, or DNS) than a single-destination problem does. QUESTION 3 — TOTAL FAILURE, OR DEGRADED? ------------------------------ "Nothing loads at all" and "it loads, just very slowly" point at different layers - per this chapter, a total failure often means routing/DNS/firewall, while slowness often means something further up the stack (e.g. a proxy, VPN, or NAT path adding latency, per Chapter 8). QUESTION 4 — JUST STARTED, OR ALWAYS BROKEN? ------------------------------ Something that worked yesterday and doesn't today means "something changed" - a config push, an expired certificate, a new firewall rule - which is a genuinely different search than something that has simply never worked, which points toward a setup or configuration issue that was never actually correct. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It reproduces all four questions accurately and explains, for each one, what a specific answer points the investigation toward - matching the chapter's own stated reasoning for why each question narrows the search rather than just listing the questions without their purpose.