Lab Objective:
Learn how to use some Microsoft CLI commands.
Lab Purpose:
You will revert to the command-line tools for troubleshooting, so you need to know the most common ones.
Lab Tool:
Windows 10
Lab Topology:
Use a single PC. Note that if you use a virtual machine, you may not always be able to see some of the same options.
Lab Walkthrough:
Task 1:
Use the search bar and search for ‘cmd. You should see ‘Command Prompt’ as an option which you can select. This will take you to the Microsoft command line tool.
Task 2:
Type tracert 101labs.net and note the path the traffic takes. You will see your local gateway router, ISP, and then various connections until you reach the server hosting the website.
Each of the 3 columns is a response from the named router and the time it took (each hop is tested 3 times). For example, in line 2, the first try took 61ms (61 milliseconds), the second took 57ms, and the third took 51ms. You will notice that line 3 ‘timed out’, that is because there was no response from the router, so another one was tried (149.28.184.1), which was successful.
You will also notice that the time it took quadrupled while passing through the global-gateway network pccwbtn.net.
Task 3:
nslookup is short for nameserver lookup. It’s a powerful command-line tool available on my operating systems and used to query DNS domain names or IP addresses mappings. You would use it to troubleshoot DNS issues on your hosts or server.
Issue an nslookup for IP address 72.163.4.185. Notice that my home router is providing the entry. This is a reverse lookup, i.e., finding which website is associated with which IP address.
Issue the same command but query a Google DNS server to look up the IP address.
Task 4:
netstat is short for network statistics. It’s another command line tool and is used to display network connections for TCP, routing tables and various network interface statistics. It is available on Linux, Solaris, Windows and BSD. You would typically use it to troubleshoot network issues, determine traffic details and for performance measurement.
Task 5:
Check the PC’s current routing table with the netstat -r command (you can also use the route print command on Windows). I’ve regularly asked for this output from server engineers when they try to blame the network team for routing issues! You would get more interesting output from a live network server but I’m working on a home PC for these labs.
Task 6:
Set your PC to shut down in one minute by typing shutdown -s -t 60, where the value is in seconds. Only press the enter key if you actually want the PC to shutdown. Otherwise, check the options with the shutdown /? command.
Notes:
Please try out some of the other switches available with the command.
