Windows 95 Tools |
Windows 95 includes a few useful tools that will help you monitor your internet
connection.
(most of these tools are run from the DOS prompt)
 | ping |
Ping is the most basic tool to check your internet connectivity to a particular site.
Ping sends packets to a remote site and measures the time it takes for the packets to
return. By default, a 32 byte long packet is sent 4 times.
A typical output looks like:
C:\>ping www.yahoo.com Pinging www5.yahoo.com [204.71.177.70] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 204.71.177.70: bytes=32 time=102ms TTL=244 Reply from 204.71.177.70: bytes=32 time=106ms TTL=244 Reply from 204.71.177.70: bytes=32 time=95ms TTL=244 Reply from 204.71.177.70: bytes=32 time=96ms TTL=244
This example shows a set of pings to 'Yahoo'.
The address www.yahoo.com is translated into www5.yahoo.com.
This is a special property of Yahoo. The address 'www.yahoo.com' represents a collection
of servers. www5.yahoo.com is one of these servers. The numeric IP address of the server
is 204.71.177.70.
In this example I used the default setting, which will send 32 bytes, 4 times.
The last 4 lines list the connection information for the 4 ping attempts. The time it took
for the packet of 32 bytes to get to Yahoo and back was about 100 ms. A good time.
Possible Problems: Some networks will not allow pings and return a 'host
unreachable' for security reasons. Other networks will give pings a lower priority than
'regular' traffic.
| tracert (Trace Route) |
Tracert is similar to ping in that it probes the connectivity to a host on the internet. However, it doe snot just return the speed of the connection, but it will also return the addresses of the different routers your data will pass through:
C:\>tracert www.yahoo.com
Tracing route to www1.yahoo.com [204.71.200.66] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 4 ms * 4 ms rrgate [24.92.39.1] 2 5 ms 5 ms 4 ms 7507-atm.nycap.rr.com [24.92.32.254] 3 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms 204.70.67.5 4 20 ms 23 ms 12 ms core1-fddi-0.WestOrange.mci.net [204.70.64.17] 5 79 ms 85 ms 79 ms bordercore2.Bloomington.mci.net [166.48.176.1] 6 600 ms 90 ms 88 ms hssi1-0.br2.NUQ.globalcenter.net [166.48.177.254] 7 214 ms 214 ms 231 ms fe4-0.cr1.NUQ.globalcenter.net [206.251.1.1] 8 99 ms 87 ms 87 ms pos6-0.cr2.SNV.globalcenter.net [206.251.0.30] 9 89 ms 88 ms 86 ms www1.yahoo.com [204.71.200.66]
Trace complete.
The tracert example shows how data from my home machine is routed from the RR network to MCI's network, transferred to the 'Globalcenter' Network and finally handed on to Yahoo. It also shows a possible bottleneck in the Globalcenter part of the connection.
| netstat |
Netstat will show some statistics about your internet connection. By itself, netstat will return a list of currently active connections. netstat -e returns the total number of bytes and packets you send and received through the Ethernet port since the last reboot of the machine.
| winipcfg |
finally a nice Windows program, not a DOS utility. winipcfg will show all the
configuration parameters currently active: you IP address, the address of your gateway,
and the DNS address (and more).
Further Reading
- DOS help files (e.g. ping /?)
- Tucows. Depository of many useful utilities, e.g.
nice graphical versions of ping and tracert.