How to use operating system tools to troubleshoot network issues
Published · updated
Knowing the standard Windows operating system tools to troubleshoot network problems is important to your success as a Support Agent.
The first thing that you need to know is the command line prompt. While this is not a network tool, it's needed to run all the network tools.
Press Windows+R to open “Run” box. Type “cmd” and then click “OK” to open a regular Command Prompt.
Ping
If you learn anything from this article at least how to use ping. It's the most basic network tool but it has a lot of value.
The basic command is ping <hostname or IP address>,
In this case, we are trying to reach the website Macy's. It takes between 142 ms to 150 ms to reach the site. We also get the IP of the site and most importantly you know that this computer can reach the site. There is also additional information available but I'm not going into those details.
On some operating systems like Mac & Unix, you need to stop the ping command or it will continue running.
So in the following example, we tried to reach a site but failed to reach it. Assuming that the URL is correct, the website is either down, or the DNS server is not resolving the domain comandzero.com.
NSLookup
One way to determine if it's a DNS name resolution problem is to run nslookup. Just run:
nslookup www.comandzero.com
Again assuming that the domain is not misspelled, the DNS server 100.64.254.1 can't find www.comandzero.com. So the customer needs to change their DNS or more likely fix their spelling. ;-)
Tracert or Traceroute (Mac & Linux)
Functionally, tracert works just like ping in that instead of running a single ICMP echo request, it sends a series of echo requests and the TTL (Time to Live) is increased by 1 each time. By doing this, the tool can show the routers that are handling your connection.
The only problem is that some firewalls will block these packets even though the website is working fine.
IpConfig
I don't use ipconfig much troubleshooting customer's problem. But I use it a lot for my own computers when they don't work. To use the command just type ipconfig (For Mac & Linux users use ifconfig)
Running the command will give you the IP v6 address, IP v4 address, subnet mask, and default gateway that the computer is currently using.
NetStat
ARP
NbtStat
Hostname
Route
PathPing
NetDiag