You are a network administrator for a medium$-$sized company. One morning, you receive reports from several employees in the marketing department that they are unable to access the company's internal marketing database. The database is hosted on a server within your local network.

After initial questioning, you determine that the issue is isolated to the marketing department, and other departments are not experiencing any problems accessing the database. You decide to use the top$-$to$-$bottom OSI model approach to troubleshoot the issue.

Using the top$-$to$-$bottom OSI model approach, which of the following steps should you take first to troubleshoot the connectivity issue experienced by the marketing department?

###answer###

Confirm that the switches and routers connecting the marketing department to the server are functioning correctly.

Verify the physical connections, such as cables and NICs, in the marketing department.

Check to see if the server hosting the database is properly configured at the application layer.

Ensure that the IP addresses are correctly assigned to the marketing department's computers.