Basic Network Testing Tools

ipconfig – Quickly Find Your IP Address

You can find your IP address from the Control Panel, but this takes quite a few clicks. The ipconfig command is a fast way of determining your computer’s IP address and other information, such as the address of its default gateway — useful if you want to know the IP address of your router’s web interface.

To use the command, just type ipconfig into a Command Prompt window. You’ll see a list of all the network connections your computer is using. Look under Wireless LAN adapter if you’re connected to Wi-Fi or Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection if you’re connected to a wired network.

ping, tracert – Troubleshoot Network Connection Issues

If you’re experiencing issues connecting to a website or other network connection issues, Windows and other operating systems have some standard tools you can use to identify problems.

First, there’s the ping command. Type ping google.com and Windows will send packets to Google.com. Google will respond and let you know it’s received them. You’ll be able to see if any packets didn’t make it to Google.com — perhaps you’re experiencing packet loss — and how long it took you to hear back — perhaps the network is saturated and packets are taking a while to reach their destinations.

There’s also the tracert command, which traces the route it takes for a packet to reach a destination. For example, run tracert google.com and you’ll see the path your packet takes to reach Google. If you’re having issues connecting to a website, tracert can show you where the problem is occurring.

telnet – Connect to Telnet Servers

The telnet client isn’t installed by default. You’ll have to install it from the Control Panel. Once installed, you can use the telnet command to connect to telnet servers without installing any third-party software.

You should avoid using telnet if you can help it, but if you’re connected directly to a device and it requires that you use telnet to set something up — well, that’s what you have to do.

netstat -an – List Network Connections and Ports

The netstat command is particularly useful, displaying all sorts of network statistics when used with its various options. One of the most interesting variants of netstat is netstat -an, which will display a list of all open network connections on their computer, along with the port they’re using and the foreign IP address they’re connected to.

Nslookup – name resolution

The nslookup tool can help you to verify that DNS name resolution is working correctly. When you run nslookup against a hostname, the tool will show you how the name was resolved, as well as which DNS server was used during the lookup. This tool can be extremely helpful when troubleshooting problems related to legacy DNS records that still exist but that are no longer correct.

To use this tool, just enter the nslookup command followed by the name of the host you want to resolve. For example:

nslookup yahoo.com