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 Unlike troubleshooting software and hardware, troubleshooting network issues is a whole 'nother beast. When you are working with networks, you are working with multiple devices and distance. Figuring out where the problem is on the route to its destination will help you determine what you need to do in order to resolve the issue. I am going to talk a little bit about the ping and tracert commands and how I used them to troubleshoot my Internet connection today.
About an hour and a half ago, my Internet connection started acting really goofy. Websites would only load on every fifth or sixth request, sometimes they would not load at all. I was generally not having a good time with the Internet. This is a problem that has been coming and going for the longest time. Sometimes lasting up to ten hours. Some of the concepts I have learned in the networking classes I am currently taking are what really helped me figure out this problem. Start locally and work your way out Always remember that data starts at your computer and has to stop at many different hops while on its way to and from the server you are communicating with. Start at the beginning of the route and then work to the end. Start by trying to figure out if any of your hardware is bad. The first stop for packets is your ethernet controller, which is usually built in to the motherboard and it is also where you plug in your ethernet cable into your computer. To figure out if the ethernet controller is working, you will need to open up a command prompt by typing 'cmd' in the Run console which is found in the Start Menu. Type 'ping 127.0.0.1'. This command sends an echo request to your localhost, which is your ethernet controller. If all of the packets echo back correctly, you know that your ethernet controller is functioning properly.
The next stop for packets is the default gateway, which is either a router or your modem. Either way, you will need to figure out the IP address of the default gateway. To do this, type 'ipconfig /all' into the command prompt. The default gateway should pop up somewhere in that mess of numbers. My default gateway a Linksys router and the IP for it is 192.168.1.1. Let's ping that address to make sure that my router is working. So I type 'ping 192.168.1.1'. All of the packets are echo'd back correctly. At this point I also ran 'tracert 192.168.1.1' to make sure there was nothing weird with the route map. It came up as the only hop, so that is normal. So now we know that both the ethernet controller and the router are working correctly. The next stop for packets is the modem. If you are connected through a router, I believe you can only get the IP of the modem by looking in the router settings. To get into the router settings you would just put the IP address of the router into your browser. In my case: 192.168.1.1. You will be prompted for a password. If you've never set a password, it might be a combination of admin and blank or password for the password. You can try looking up the default password for your router online or read your router's instruction manual to figure it out. Once you get in, you will be able to find the IP address for the router listed under the Status tab for Linksys routers. Anyway, ping and tracert that IP. If everything comes back fine, you now know that your ethernet controller, router, and modem are working. Now it's off to the Inernet... kinda. The next stop is DNS servers. Your assigned DNS servers can be found using the 'ipconfig /all' command. Run a ping and tracert on those. Now this is where I ran into problems. I lost packets on the ping and the tracert took forever and I believe I had a couple of no responses along the way also. So my problem was with the DNS servers for some reason. What can I do about a bad DNS server? Well you can do a couple of things if your DNS server goes down. First you can try the command 'ipconfig /release' followed by 'ipconfig renew'. I am really not sure if the above commands will work for the problem because I did not even use them to fix my problem. But if I could go back to when my DNS was acting up, I'd try it. It seems to be working now so I can't test it. The way I solved the problem was by pointing my computer to the OpenDNS servers instead of my ISPs DNS servers. This solved the problem by totally bypassing my ISPs DNS servers. So even if my ISP DNS servers are down, it does not matter because I am now using a new server to resolve IP addresses. The IP address of OpenDNS's preferred server is 208.67.222.222. The alternate address is 208.67.220.220. If you don't know how to change DNS settings, you can figure it out on this page by OpenDNS. It might be a good idea to write down those two IP addresses on a notepad in case you ever need to change DNS settings out in the field. After troubleshooting using the above steps, I realized that I could have quickly identified the problem by running a tracert to a distant IP address and looking to see if the IPs were resolved. That means look at whether the IPs are given names or if they are just numbers. If they are just numbers, then most likely your DNS is not working because it should be translating those IP addresses into human readable words. And that is it for my little lesson on using ping and tracert and figuring out basic network problems. I know networking can get really confusing sometimes, so if you have any questions about what I wrote - please ask me! I'd be glad to explain or refine this article to make it easier to understand. And remember, there is a lot more to networking than this. It's possible that you will be dealing with a problem way beyond the scope of this article. This article is meant to just touch a little bit on the basics of network troubleshooting! If you have any questions or comments about this article, please leave a comment below. I'd love to hear your opinion and I really appreciate all comments. If you'd like to be notified of new updates, please consider subscribing to the ProPCBiz RSS Feed. If you are a Twitter user, you can follow me at twitter.com/Phishie8 for the latest updates. Thanks for reading!
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