Essential Windows Commands

Very often when new users are having problems, its very hard for admins to find the problem. By learning these basic commands, you can help yourself and help your admin find the cause of your problem much quicker. Below is a list some basic, but very usefull Windows command prompt tools.

PING

Test a network connection - if successful, ping returns the ip address.

Syntax

PING [options] destination_host

Options

 
-w timeout          Timeout in milliseconds to wait for each reply.
-i TTL              Time To Live.
-v TOS              Type Of Service.
-a                  Resolve addresses to hostnames.
-n count            Number of echo requests to send.
-t                  Ping the destination host until interrupted.
-l size             Send buffer size.
-f                  Set Don't Fragment flag in packet.
-r count            Record route for count hops.
-s count            Timestamp for count hops.
-j host_list        Loose source route along host_list.
-k host_list        Strict source route along host_list.
destination_host    The name of the remote host

• A response of "Request timed out" means there was no response to the ping attempt in the default time period of one second.

If the latency of the response is more than one second. Use the -w option on the ping command to increase the time-out. For example, to allow responses within five seconds, use ping -w 5000.

• A successful PING does NOT always return an %errorlevel% == 0. Therefore to reliably detect a successful ping - pipe the output into FIND and look for the text "TTL"

• Note that "Reply" in the output of PING does not always indicate a positive response. You may receive a message from a router such as: Reply from 192.168.1.254: Destination Net Unreachable.

Four steps to test an IP connection with ping:

1. Ping the loopback address to verify that TCP/IP is installed and configured correctly on the local computer.

PING 127.0.0.1

1. Ping the IP address of the local computer to verify that it was added to the network correctly.

PING IP_address_of_local_host

1. Ping the IP address of the default gateway to verify that the default gateway is functioning and that you can communicate with a local host on the local network.

PING IP_address_of_default_gateway

1. Ping the IP address of a remote host to verify that you can communicate through a router.

PING IP_address_of_remote_host