ECT 373 – Introduction To Data Communications And Networking: Lab 2 Essay Example

<Prof Name>

Summary:
This lab was a very interesting and informative lab which enabled me to understand the important concepts of networking. The lab gave the opportunity to understand the basic and essential network operations and the various commands to configure as well as see the network configuration. All the steps to run the commands were mostly given in details which were extremely helpful. All the steps worked and I was able to understand and implement all the steps without any trouble.
The hands-on opportunity was provide by the lab to understand and configure basic routing. I was able to learn how to add or update the routing table in windows by using the ROUTE command. Then some terminology I was able to understand and demonstrate, especially for the commands – ipconfig, ping and tracert. The definitions, demonstration and screenshot as required are given in detail in the appendix.
The lab also gave the chance to understand as to how the windows server can be used to operate as a router. I was able to open the relevant utility which is under Administrative Tools> Routing and Remote Access> IP Routing. That the server can act as a router or a DHCP relay agent for a server that automatically assigns IP addresses, was clearly noticed. It showed that the Windows server is really very versatile.
Finally this lab gave me hands on experience to configure IP address, subnet mask and the gateway. The steps as given in the lab were very accurate and easy to understand and implement. This gave a lot of confidence in configuring IP addresses and gateway for any computer. Overall it was quite enjoyable experience and as all the commands worked properly, it gave the opportunity to understand network concepts quickly and clearly.

Appendix:

Activity 1
The command as below was given.
>Route add 192.168.24.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.2.0
The screen is taken and attached below:
The new route information by typing below command is given in the below figure.
> route print
Activity 2
Troubleshooting TCP/IP and routing
Ipconfig is a windows command, which has been available in all the versions of windows. It can be invoked by first going to command prompt and then typing <ipconfig>.
This command helps in getting the information and related details of the machine’s IP address. As a default, simply typing and entering <ipconfig> command, returns the machine’s ip address, gateway and the mask. If more than one network adapters are connected, the command will return the ip and details of all the adapters as the ip is mapped to a network adapter.
The below command demonstrates the use of ipconfig:
Ping is another utility or a program which is also available to be run from the command line prompt in windows. The ping command is used to verify whether an IP address in question is available or not. Ping command merely sends a minimalist network packet or a few bits to the designated ip address. It may be possible that the IP address exists but is not reachable through the router. So basically ping command informs whether the particular ip address is available for communication or not from the given machine.
The below command show the use of ping utility:
>ping localhost
(the above command tests whether the local network adapter is working or not)
TRACERT is the traceroute utility which is usally used in conjunction with the ping. The utility traces the route between the machine the utility is given and to the destination, and also reporting the time taken at each hop. A hop is portion in the network between a machine and the next router, or from the router to the next router or intermediate or from intermediate point to the next router, and so on. So traceroute utility gives the total time taken by the packet to cross all hops and reach the destination.
The traceroute utility can be demonstrated as follows:
Suppose we want to trace the route between my computer to the DNS server of my internet provider, then I can do so by merely giving the following command:
>tracert 192.168.56.11
This is shown in the below figure:
Activity 3
This activity pertains to configure the IP as given below:
IP address on the PC should be 192.128.142.19
The subnet mask should be 255.255.0.0
The gateway IP address is 192.128.100.1
No DNS and DHCP are being used.
The procedure was followed and the screen was taken as shown below: