Worse still is the fact that the number of protocols and services in use on those networks has also increased from a handful to hundreds. While it used to be that a single super-administrator could manage the routers, domain name servers, mail servers, and other resources on the network, we are now faced with so much specialization that it is impossible for any one person to follow everything. At many of the larger firms, there are entire departments that do nothing but manage the network routers, while other groups manage the dial-up servers and others still who manage the web and mail systems, domain name systems, and news groups. This is a serious problem. Furthermore, debugging and analyzing Internet problems defies specialization.
Problems often arise because of the interactions between different parts of the network.
When problems do occur, administrators have a variety of tools available for debugging purposes. This includes packet analyzers that can show you the inner core of the network traffic, although they won t tell you what that traffic means. Another set of tools is the vendor s own documentation, although more often than not the vendor s documentation is based on the same misreading of the specs as the problematic software. One of the last alternatives is for the administrator to prowl through the protocol s technical specifications in order to determine where the problem really lies. But when it's 4 a.m. and the web server in Chicago keeps dropping its connection to the database server in Atlanta, these specifications are of limited use.