Here we are back again with some more new stuff to learn. In our first article we went through an Introduction to CMD, its benefits and limitations. In second article we went through the basic CMD commands like creating, copying, renaming, deleting files using CMD.
In this article we will get into some networking stuff like looking up IPs, checking your internet connection and much more.
SYSTEMINFO
It works as it sounds, it gives you all available hardware information about your system like information about processor, cards available, available hotfixes and much more. All you have to do is type [box]systeminfo[/box]
PING
It is a basic command which tell us whether a website or service you are trying to connect/reach is online or not. Ping command by default sends 32-bit packets to the requested website and receives them back, showing the time taken and the packets lost during transmission, which tells us about the efficiency and ping of a particular website or service.
User can ping a website or an IP address. [box]Syntax: ping [website/IP]
Example: ping www.google.com and ping 172.19.1.235[/box]
TRACERT
Basically tracert stands for Trace Route. It is used to trace the paths (IPs to be specific) that a message is going through, to reach from source to destination. It is helpful in large networks where there are several paths available for a message to reach destination or if there is a large distance between source and destination. In some cases it helps us to determine if our data is being sent through unauthorized IP address. Sometimes black hat hackers steals your data by changing the way information is shared through servers.
[box]Syntax: trace [website/IP][/box]
Let’s take an example, here we are going to trace route www.google.com use command
[box]trace www.google.com[/box]
It shows all the routes (IP of servers) our message went through to reach www.google.com.
PATHPING
It is a hybrid command which combines the functionality of ping and tracert.
It provides the network latency, network loss along with the routes through which the packet went. Syntax is same as before.
Let us take an example
[box]pathping www.google.com[/box]
NETSTAT
It stands for Net status, and gives all information about the servers/services your PC is connected to, basically information about services connected to, TCP/IP.
You can see if your PC is connected to some server that you don’t want it to, like most of the spyware software do.
User can control the way information is displayed on CMD with the help of switches, we will discuss in the end of article what a switch is and how it can be beneficial.
Let us look at some of the useful switches which are used with netstat
To see all active connections
[box]netstat -a[/box]
To see all addresses and port numbers
[box]netstat -n[/box]
To see your Ethernet statistics, received and send bytes, packets
[box]netstat -e[/box]
[box]netstat -s[/box]
It gives full IP Statistics for IP, IPv6, ICMP, ICMPv6, TCP, TCPv6, UDP, and UDPv6
IPCONFIG
It shows all configuration information related to your computer.
[box]ipconfig /all[/box]
shows all the adapters and their configuration information
[box]ipconfig /flushdns[/box] removes your DNS cache on PC
SWITCHES
Switches are combined with commands to sort/specify the search domain. Switches reduces the search time and gives specific results. It also provides all the info and details about the command, what and how you can use that particular command.
Every command uses different switches, to look up for the switches for a command we add
[box]”/?” at the end of command
Examples: ping /? , netstat /? , cd /? , cls /?[/box]
Interesting stuff coming in next article. Remotely controlling other computer, shutting down background programs/unwanted malware program and a lot more.
