DOS Commands Review - Study Material for Network Administrators

This study material covers important DOS commands for network administrators including IPCONFIG, PING, TRACERT, NETSTAT, NSLOOKUP, and more. It explains their features and usage with relevant figures and examples. It also highlights the importance of these commands for network security.

Running head: DOS COMMANDS REVIEW
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Introduction
This paper will highlight some of the commands which network administrator ought to
familiarize themselves with so to constantly monitor an organization’s network
IPCONFIG command
An IP address is one of the features displayed by the IPCONFIG command. IP address is
part of TCP/IP protocols as it allows one to get online. SN Mask is a number which defines a
range of IP addresses which can be used in a certain network. SN mask is used to designate
subnets or sub-networks and to limit traffic between multiple network traffic. An example of SN
Mask is 255.255.255.0 which is a class IP address.
DNS is another feature which is associated with Ipconfig as shown by figure one above.
It is defined as a de-centralized naming system for services, computers and other resources
which are connected to the internet. Gateway is the last feature viewed in the ipconfig command.
The major aim of the gateway is to translate one protocol into another. Others displayed by
IPCONFIG command are Ethernet adapter, wireless LAN adapter, and tunnel adapter teredo
tunneling pseudo-interface (Matthews, 2007).
Figure 1: IP Config

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PING command
PING command is another DOS command line tool which is widely used by network
administrators. The command is used to test the ability of a certain user computer to reach a
certain destination. Example as shown by figure 2 where the command is used test if my user
computer is able to reach onto www.google.com. The command has sent four packets as the
time taken is between 34 ms and 68ms.

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Figure 2: PING command
From figure two one of the features with ping command is the Time To Live (TTL). This
is the value in Internet Protocol packet which tells a certain network router either the packet is
too long or it should be discarded. Packets get lost when a packet fails to reach the required
destination.
Figure three shows the IP address of phsc.edu which is 23.185.0.1

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Figure 3: phsc.edu IP address
TRACERT command
From the figure, my router is 192.168.42.129 all the way to www.google.com which
has the public IP address of 216.58.223.68. There are ten devices which are owned by ISP. Some
of the links are slower due to their content; if a site contains pictures and videos the site has to be
slower
As shown by Figure four TRACERT utility is used by network administrators to show
the path taken by a certain packet from a user computer to the destination that one specifies. The
TRACERT command is also referred to as the traceroute command.

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Figure 4: TRACERT command
Figure 5: TRACERT command in use

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Figure 6: TRACING www.Google.com
NETSTAT command
This is a command which is used to display information on how a device
communicates with the other network devices or computers. The command shows the details of
network connections. Netstat command is used by network administrators to show the lists of all
ports which are open
As shown by the figure seven and eight netstat command is used to show internet and
network connections. Netstat –b displays all the executable which are involved when creating
each of the listening port. The information displayed by netstat is very important to the network
security team since it shows a list of all the active TCP connections

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Figure 7: NETSTAT command
Figure 9: NETSTAT –b command

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Figure 10: Nestat –b command
NSLOOKUP command
This is another command available for network administrators. The command is
utilized network administrators so as to query the Domain Name System so as to obtain an
Internet Protocol address and the exact domain name. (Blanc & Cotton, 2014)
Figure 11: NSLOOK-up command

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The reason as to why there is multiple IP addresses associated with one domain name
is because the configuration in each of the network assigns to a different Domain Name Server
for an IP address lookup which can lead to multiple IP addresses. Also, multiple IP addresses are
associated with a single domain due to load balancing requests sent google so as to increase
response time and availability. Nslookup is able to query the third party for the three IP address
highlighted in figure 11 as it is able to identify the DNS server which is currently configured to
three IP addresses. Someone can use NSlookup command in an unethical manner to steal
information and files from devices. An IP address and domain name or an IP address are
registered with ICANN which is an accredited registrar. In here the registrar usually checks for
domain names which are available so as to create a WHOIS record (Blanc & Cotton, 2014).

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Other two commands
Other commands which can be used by network administrators are pathping which is
used together with TRACERT and GETMAC is another command which is used to show the
physical address (Kurose & Ross, 2017).
References

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Beal, V. (2018). Ipconfig. Retrieved from Embracing Digital Transformation:
https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/I/ipconfig.html
Blanc, R. P., & Cotton, I. W. (2014). Computer networking by Robert P Blanc .
Kurose, J. F., & Ross, K. W. (2017). Computer networking : a top-down approach. Boston.
Matthews, J. (2007). Computer networking : Internet protocols in action (1st edition ed.). New
York: Springer.