TCP/IP Utilities Lab

In this lab we used some tools by using the command prompt.

In the first exercise we used the Ipconfig command. This utility can be used alone to list information about the TCP/IP configuration. It also has several command switches to manage a computer's TCP/IP settings. Four of these switches are:

/? - This one displays a list of switches to use with the ipconfig command

/all - Displays the complete TCP/IP configuration information

/release - Releases DHCP-assigned IP address

/renew - Renews DHCP-assigned IP address

The Netstat utility displays details and statistics of the TCP/IP components and connections on a host. There are several switches available for this utility also. A few of them are:

-a - Lists all available TCP and UDP connections.

-e - List details about the packets sent over a network interface.

-n - List the current connected host by their port and IP address

-p - Lets you specify the type of protocol statistic to list, TCP or UDP

Nbtstat is a utility that works with networks running Windows and NetBIOS. Switches are also available for this utility.

-a - Display's a machine's name table given its NetBIOS name

-A - Displays a machine's name table given its IP address

-r- Lists statistics about names that have been resolved to IP addresses by broadcast and by WINS

-s - Displays a list of all the current NetBIOS sessions for a machine

Hostname utility is used to find the hostname the computer was assigned and if you have administrator privileges, you can change the hostname at the prompt


Nslookup is a utility that allows you to find the host name of any computer on the network by querying the DNS database by specifying its IP address or you can find the IP address by specifying its hostname.

Traceroute (tracert) is a utility that uses ICMP ECHO request to trace the path from one node on the network to another and identifies all the intermediate hops between the two nodes. Some of the popular switches for tracert are:

-d - tells the tracert command not to resolve IP addresses to host name

-h - lists the maximum number of hops the packets should take when attempting to reach a host

-w - Identifies a timeout period for responses