Checking if System is definitely offline

Post date: Jun 16, 2016 9:43:7 AM

The first thing we need to do is double check that the unit we are looking at is actually the right unit, the easiest way is to check the IP address to ensure it is in the correct place (ie. if its a 192.168.9.* address, its in our office!)

So we can see the IP address is in the 192.168.4 range, which means its in Stansted.

Next we need to do is confirm that the unit is actually offline in Unity and it isn’t a red herring, Central runs as a separate server and controls the Live connection for instant connection and control of a unit.

We need to check and make sure that the screenshot has also not pinged in (as this is via a separate process)

Below the screenshot, there is a date that says the last time it pinged in..

You can see that in this situation, (Todays date being the 16 June, and it being 9:53),

You can see that the screenshot pinged in around within an hour before so it looks like the PC has actually gone down.

If this wasn’t the case this would be a Unity Central Failure, which to fix this is out of scope of this guide.

OK, we need to just double check on Centrastage that the unit is definitely offline,

So we need to search for the unit and check its current status using the search box at the top:

This has returned everything with D27 in the name

We can see for STN-D27, that it says offline, and also we can’t use the remote support icons.

We can remote into another Unit to ping the IP address, just to make sure (this ensures that it isn’t a DNS issue, as we’re cutting pretty much everything out)

So for stansted, we have a staging server, so lets remote into that.

We need to click the connect icon on the right hand side.

This will open a separate control window, but we DON’T want to actually take control of the screen.

So we want to do the command line function using the following icon:

Next we want to ping the IP address of the unit that we’ve either got off Unity or Centrastage previously.

You can see that its definitely not responding so its definitely offline.

This is where we can look at using MESH to bring the system back up using AMT.

If it was the case that it responded then there are a few liklihoods.

A) There is a local DNS failure preventing the system from finding external URLS

B) There is some local issue, in which case we will have to use remote desktop or dameware to remote in and try and solve.