What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

The first step in solving any connectivity problem is to see if you can see the server from a client machine. Here are a few tips that help you accomplish this task.

Assumptions

For testing purposes, we have made the following assumptions:
  • The client machine's IP address is 192.168.1.10 and its host name is clientOne
  • The server machine's IP address is 192.168.1.20 and its host name is serverOne. Besides, the server machine can also be reached by its fully qualified domain name (FQDN), which is serverOne.CompanyOne.com
  • The server machine is running a database, which is listening on TCP/IP port 1433

Ping

This first step is to ping the server machine from the client. Use the following steps to perform this test.
  • Click on the start button, select Run and type cmd .  On Windows Vista and Windows 7, you don't have the Run item. Instead, just type cmd in the search bar and hit ENTER.
  • This will open up the Console window (DOS). Type the following command

    ping serverOne

  • You should see a reply back that looks like:

    What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

  • If you get a reply back with an error, it can mean any of the following:
    • You typed the host name incorrectly
    • Host name cannot be resolved to an IP address
    • The server machine cannot be reached on the network
  • Try solving this problem before proceeding to the next step

If this ping test passes, it means that your client machine can see the server machine. This does NOT mean you can connect to the server machine.

Using Telnet to test connectivity

Once the ping test passes, you can use Telnet to test if your client machine can connect to the server machine. Use the following steps to perform this test
  • Type the following in the Console (DOS) Window

    telnet serverOne 1433

    IMPORTANT: On Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft does not install the Telnet client by default. You will have to install this manually from Add Remove Windows Component.

  • You should either see a blank screen or something garbled representing some binary data. This means you can connect to the server.
  • If you get a message like:

    Could not open connection to the host, on port 1433: Connection failed

    It means you cannot connect and there is a network problem.

Following is a list of reason why you cannot connect.
  • Most of the time a firewall is blocking the traffic. This firewall can either be on your local machine or on the server. Check both ends for a firewall. If the actual server is on a different network, for example across the Internet, there could be other firewalls in the middle.
  • The server process is NOT running. Ensure the server is running
  • Ensure the TCP/IP port number is correct. In the above example, I used 1433

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When working with computer networks, it’s important to keep a close eye on network performance, traffic or bandwidth usage, and network configurations. If problems arise in a business environment, quick troubleshooting could make the difference between uninterrupted service and long delays, which impact both productivity for employees and service delivery for your end users.

Network utilities can help you keep on top of network performance issues, spot problems and where they originate, and fix them quickly. In this guide, I’ll review how network utilities work before moving on to my list of recommended tools and utilities.

What Are Network Utilities?

Network utilities are basic software tools designed for analyzing and configuring various aspects of computer networks. They usually focus on one part of the network connection or one kind of device. Most network utilities were designed for Unix computer systems, but they’ve now been developed for use on all operating systems.

Network utilities help you keep your network functioning properly by allowing you to check the various aspects of your network, such as connections between devices, packet loss, and latency between connections. If a network issue arises, a network utility can help you pinpoint the problem—whether it’s rooted in a particular connection, a particular device, and so on—and troubleshoot it before it affects your services, applications, and users.

Top 10 Network Utilities and Tools for Everyday Use

1. SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset (ETS) – Over 60 Network Tools

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

This is my recommended solution for handling network utilities in general. SolarWinds® Engineer’s Toolset™ offers a large collection of utilities—over 60 network tools in total—built into one piece of software. The remainder of this list outlines several individual tools, many of which are also included in ETS. If you want to control all your network utilities from one centralized console, this software allows you to do so.

SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset exemplary tools:

  • DHCP Scope Monitor
  • Config Viewer
  • DNS Audit
  • Password Generator
  • PING Sweep
  • Switch Port Mapper
  • Mac Finder
  • Bandwidth Gauges
  • SNMP MIB Browser
  • Memory monitor
  • Response-time monitor
  • SNMP Dictionary Attack, and much more…

One of the first tasks ETS is designed to perform is network discovery and mapping. The software allows you to determine what equipment you have on your network, discover MAC and IP address relationships, and map your switch ports using tools such as Port Scanner, Switch Port Mapper, SNMP Sweep, IP Network Browser, MAC Address Discovery, and Ping Sweep.

Next, you can use ETS for monitoring and alerting in real time, which can help you prevent network issues from reaching your end users and reducing productivity or reliability. Monitoring tools built in to the software include Response Time Monitor, CPU Monitor, Interface Monitor, Memory Monitor, and TraceRoute.

Alongside these network monitoring tools, Engineer’s Toolset comes with useful features for protecting network security, including tools for router password decryption and protecting against SNMP brute force and dictionary attacks. It also helps you manage your IP addresses and DNS addresses, through utilities such as DHCP Scope Monitor, DNS Structure Analyzer, DNS Audit, IP Address Management, and Subnet Calculator. This well-rounded approach to network management helps ensure you don’t miss anything to help keep your network functioning at its best.

ETS integrates easily with other SolarWinds products, including SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), to keep your network healthy. You can access a free trial of ETS for up to 14 days.

2. Ping

Ping is a basic networking utility that comes with your operating system. You can use it to check whether an IP address can be reached. Using ping is simple: open a terminal and type in the command ping. You can also use it through a web interface as linked above.

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

Ping does two main things. First, it checks whether there’s a connection between the machine you’re pinging from and another machine (or more specifically, another IP address) on the network. Second, it looks at the speed of the connection, also known as the latency time. The latency time is the round-trip time, or the time a packet takes to reach the other IP address and return, measured in milliseconds.

In short, ping can help you to understand basic connections and response times for the purposes of troubleshooting. You can use it to see if there is an issue or a slowdown between two machines, or whether there’s a lot of packet loss.

3. Tracert

Tracert, also known as traceroute, is another basic networking utility. You can access it through the command line on most operating systems.

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

Tracert is useful in a similar way to ping, in that it looks at the connection between the sender and the destination. Unlike ping, however, tracert provides details on all the “hops” the packet went through to get to the destination, including switches and routers, along with the IP address and DNS information of each. It then breaks down the information of each hop to show the latency between points.

If you’ve already detected a slowdown between two IP addresses, and you want to break it down further to determine the point at which the problem is occurring (such as between the router and the end destination), tracert can help.

4. ARP

ARP stands for “Address Resolution Protocol.” It’s used to determine the MAC address associated with a particular IP address. You can use the ARP network utility to display the ARP table, which shows the mappings between IP and MAC addresses.

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

This protocol can be useful in determining which devices on the network are linked to the current device, particularly in cases where you think there might be a malicious device connected to your network. You would do this by running the ARP command, and looking in the ARP table for unknown IP addresses.

5. Netstat

Another useful command-line network utility is netstat. Netstat, short for “network statistics,” allows you to display the network connections for TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol). Essentially, it lets you check whether the connections exist, and provides statistics to show how the connection is performing. The netstat command will show a list of TCP connections, the IP address of your computer, the IP address of the device the connection goes to (the foreign IP address), the port numbers of both, and the TCP state.

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

You can check whether various aspects of TCP/IP are working on your network by using netstat to look at bytes, unicast and non-unicast packets, discards, errors, and unknown protocols received and sent.

6. Nbtstat

Nbtstat is a primarily diagnostic network utility. It uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP, a protocol for allowing old NetBIOS applications to be run on a TCP/IP network. If there’s a problem with NetBIOS over TCP/IP, you use nbtstat to troubleshoot it.

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

Nbtstat has several features, including providing statistics for the NetBIOS over TCP/IP protocol; showing NetBIOS name tables for local and remote computers; and displaying the NetBIOS name cache. When NetBIOS over TCP/IP is working properly, it resolves the NetBIOS names to IP addresses. So, if your names and addresses aren’t being resolved, nbtstat may help you diagnose and address the problem.

7.   Nslookup

Nslookup, which stands for “name server lookup,” is used to query the domain name system (DNS) for domain name or IP address mapping, or to obtain other kinds of DNS records.

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

You can use nslookup to troubleshoot issues related to DNS. For example, if there’s an issue with name resolution for DNS, you can use nslookup to check the IP address linked to a domain name, or to look at which domain name is linked to which IP address. This way you can check whether the addresses are resolved correctly.

You can use nslookup in two different modes: interactive and non-interactive. For non-interactive nslookup, you can look at the entries in the DNS cache stored in a standard way. If you want to make a single query for a single domain entry, this is a good approach. If you want to complete more complex searches, you should use the interactive mode.

8. IPconfig

IPconfig is an application run on the console used for displaying information on TCP/IP configuration and information pertaining to the DNS and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol).

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

This is a fast way of determining your IP address too. After you type ipconfig into the command prompt, you’ll see your IP address and the default gateway. You can also attach parameters to help you handle DNS and DHCP issues, such as DNS flush.

9. vnStat

What tool is used to test connectivity to another computer on the Internet?

vnStat is a network traffic monitor that can be used with Linux and BSD. It looks at the Linux kernel for network information statistics, rather than sniffing traffic itself. This helps keep vnStat’s use of system resources low, no matter how high the network traffic rate is. The statistics it gathers can be maintained through system reboots, and it can monitor numerous interfaces simultaneously.

For network traffic, vnStat can give you outputs as a summary, or in intervals such as hourly, daily, or monthly. The tool is open source and available under the GNU General Public License.

10. curl and Wget

The final network utilities you should be aware of are cURL and GNU Wget. Both are used for receiving files. However, there are some slight differences between them:

  • Curl uses a library (libcurl) to allow you to write programs based on cURL, whereas wget is self-contained and does not have a library.
  • Wget can download recursively or download everything from a resource (such as HTML pages or FTP directory listings).
  • However, curl supports a much larger range of protocols:
Supported ProtocolscurlWgetHTTP✔✔HTTPS✔✔FTP✔✔FTPS✔Gopher✔SCP✔SFTP✔TFTP✔TELNET✔DICT✔LDAP✔LDAPS✔FILE✔POP3(S)✔IMAP(S)✔SMB/CIFS✔SMTP(S)✔RTMP✔RTSP✔

Nonetheless, these are similar command-line tools you can use for downloading content using various protocols.

Why Good Network Utility Use Is Important

There are several reasons to use relevant network utilities. Beyond helping streamline your network performance and keep your network accessibility and performance reliable, network utilities can be used for security purposes, and to quickly troubleshoot issues when they come up.

I recommend using SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset, a robust piece of software that allows you to access your network utilities from one centralized location, simplifying and speeding up your network management processes. Once you’ve implemented ETS, it stays updated with your most-used utilities, resulting in a network utility toolbox essentially customized for you and your business needs.

Which tool would you use to check connectivity between two computers?

Ping. Ping is a basic networking utility that comes with your operating system. You can use it to check whether an IP address can be reached.

What are some of the tools used to test networks and connectivity?

List of the Top Network Testing Tools:.
1) Network Performance Testing..
2) Auvik..
3) Paessler Security..
4) Network Monitor..
5) NGENIUSONE..
6) Dynatrace..
7) Keysight..
8) Zabbix..

What command can you use to check the connectivity between your device and another device?

The ping command allows you to check if you can connect to a hostname or an IP address and provide a basic measurement of the latency or lag between your connection and the remote device. To use the ping command, simply open a command prompt and type ping [hostname] or ping [ip address] and then press enter.