Let's save my church from spending $5000

Today I'm gonna troubleshoot my church's network to keep them from spending $5000. Why $5000 you may ask? Well, it's because that is exactly what a company quoted my church. And as soon as I heard that, my hair stood up. The main issue my pastor complained about was the Wi-Fi. People could connect to it, but not get internet connection. On the upside, if you were connected to the network via Ethernet, you were just fine. So it instantly got me thinking, what if it's just the access point itself? Then I instantly remembered the OSI model. That is what we use to troubleshoot networks engineers. So I started from the physical layer. And with the physical layer comes tracing cables. After I traced the cables, I realized there was one point of failure that just wasn't communicating to the rest of the devices. It was this here gateway. When I was connecting to the gateway through an RJ45 cable with my PC, I wasn't getting an IP address. I was receiving an automatic private IP address. And that let me know one of two things: either DHCP is messed up or the network might just be dead overall. And as soon as it started making sense, I noticed something. There was this cable modem and then there was a fiber handoff, two completely separate categories of physical media. And from the modem is this weird smurf looking device that's called a 2900 series. And at that moment, I began to realize I might be dealing with two different networks for two different purposes. And I forgot to mention that there is a Netgear switch under the gateway, which makes complete sense with everything from the AP to the switch to the gateway to the ISP fiber handoff. Nothing is working. But the one thing I did notice is that the AP still broadcasted its SSID. So at one point, this network was up and running. And with that information, I did what any good network engineer would do. I rearranged the cables. And as you can see, it's working. But I didn't get time to really configure it. But this weekend, I'll be doing a lot more with this network, so stay tuned. I even told my pastor about the controller he could use to access and manage all his access points from one spot. Just to figure out this man already has one. So obviously, I go ahead and hook that bad boy up, but I didn't get time to really configure it. But this weekend, I'll be doing a lot more with this network, so stay tuned. And to verify that the Wi-Fi was working, I went to YouTube. And I went to every access point's GUI. I even told my pastor about the controller he can use to access and manage all his access points from one spot. Just to figure out this man already has one. So obviously, I go ahead and hook that bad boy up, but I didn't get time to really configure it. But this weekend, I'll be doing a lot more with this network, so stay tuned.