Network Diagnostic Commands
Network diagnostic commands are basically commands used to know your network status. these commands are typed in commands prompt of your PC/laptop. All the commands are case sensitive. Go to your start menu and search for ‘cmd’, a black dialogue box will appear and there you can give the following commands to get different information.
ipconfig: This function ‘ipconfig’ is basically a command used to know the network settings of the device you are using. to implement this command, after you have opened the command prompt, type ‘ipconfig’ and you will find list of the network settings. There is a list of functions given below to know the particular information of the network setting. After you have typed ipconfig, just use “/(command)”. e.g. ‘ipconfig/all’ for full display of configuration information.
ping: This command in simple words does the calling of the address you want to call, and after that it calculate the amount of time the network takes to answer the calling function. This also helps determines issues with the network. The ‘time’ also helps in estimating how fast your network connection is. Below is the table of commands for different functions. syntax for these extensions is ‘ping www.google.com -t’ for continuous calling of that IP address.
pathping: Pathping sends multiple Echo Request messages to each router between a source and destination over a period of time and then computes results based on the packets returned from each router. Because pathping displays the degree of packet loss at any given router or link, you can determine which routers or subnets might be having network problems. It then sends pings periodically to all of the routers over a specified time period and computes statistics based on the number returned from each.
tracert: It is visual representation of the network packet you send or receive and the amount of hops required for that packet to get to its destination. It is similar to pathping we saw earlier.
netstat: As the name says, it is command for the stats of the network, i.e. Displays active TCP connections, ports on which the computer is listening, Ethernet statistics, the IP routing table, IPv4 statistics, and IPv6 statistics.
nslookup: Displays information that you can use to diagnose Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure. Before using this tool, you should be familiar with how DNS works. The nslookup command-line tool is available only if you have installed the TCP/IP protocol.
route: This command is used to manually configure the routes in the routing table. A routing table is a set of rules, often viewed in table format, that is used to determine where data packets traveling over an Internet Protocol (IP) network will be directed. All IP-enabled devices, including routers and switches, use routing tables.
telnet: Telnet is software that allows users to remotely access another computer such as a server, network device, or other computer. With telnet, users can connect to a device or computer, manage a network device, setup a device, transfer files, etc.
getmac: Returns the media access control (MAC) address and list of network protocols associated with each address for all network cards in each computer, either locally or across a network. DOS command used to show both local and remote MAC addresses.
These were some of the commonly used network commands.