Monday, 27 February 2017

Best Windows Utilitites for Network Troubleshouting


Network Utilities

PING
I am sure most people have spent some time in an office environment or has had any dealings with computers has heard the term (ping). If you are like me you dismissed the term as technobabble, not realising that this is one of the most important and fundamental network utilities for troubleshooting network issues.


TRACEROUTE / TRACERT
The traceroute or tracert is a similar utility to ping. The only difference is ping will let you know you have an issue whereas traceroute will inform you where you have an issue.

Think of it like this, we have all heard of the pony express. You would give a letter (packet) to the rider who would gallop to the first relay station and pass on the packet to the next rider. The next rider would in turn gallop to the next relay station and pass the packet on again.  This process will go on until the packet reaches the destination address. Now suppose you have a phone to call the receiver of the packet that was sent to ask if it had arrived, and if all the contents were there? This is scenario is essentially what ping does.  Now what if all the relay stations that the packet had passed through had a phone you could call because the packet did not arrive at the final destination. You could call each relay station and find exactly where the packet was lost. This is what the traceroute utility does.

IPCONFIG
This command allows you to configure your network interface and view information about them.In most cases, the IPCONFIG command is used with the command -line switch /all. This results in more detailed information than IPCONFIG alone.

Simply put, ipconfig allows you to view all your configured network interfaces, their IP addresses, DNS servers, and other information. You can use the ipconfig /flushdns command to flush your DNS cache, forcing Windows to get new addresses and other commands that release its IP address and get a new one from its DHCP server. This utility can quickly display your computer’s IP address or help you troubleshoot problems.

NETSTAT
Another very useful networking tool is netstat. This can be used to displays incoming and outgoing network connections as well as other network information. This other information consists of how much data is being transmitted and the amount of traffic on the network. All of which can be useful for troubleshooting the network and open connections on your computer.  Netstat also displays what programs are making connections with and lots more information.
 
NSLOOKUP
Nslookup (name sever lookup) is a network administrator command- line tool that looks up an ip address associated with a domain name. Now I know what you are saying, what does all this mean? Let’s say you are looking for the ip address for fastallaght.com you can run Nslookup /fastallaght.com to see the ip address.  This command also allows you to do a reverse lookup, which means if you only had the ip address and you wanted to find the name that is associated with that ip. Type nslookup /192.168.50.26 in the command line and it will show you that the ip address is associated with fastallaght, how handy is that!

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