Top 6 TCP/IP Utilities For Networking Pros!

TCP/IP essentially provides end-to-end connectivity specifying how data should be formatted, addressed, transmitted, routed and received at the destination. The following tools will help networking pros to check the status of their network and troubleshoot and test connectivity to remote hosts.

1.Ping

Utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer. operates by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request packets to the target host and waiting for an ICMP response. In the process it measures the time from transmission to reception (round-trip time)[1] and records any packet loss.

2.traceroute

Computer network diagnostic tool for displaying the route (path) and measuring transit delays of packets across an Internet Protocol (IP) network. The history of the route is recorded as the round-trip times of the packets received from each successive host (remote node) in the route (path); the sum of the mean times in each hop indicates the total time spent to establish the connection.

3.ARP

Telecommunication protocol used for resolution of network layer addresses into link layer addresses. ARP is used to convert an IP address to a physical address such as an Ethernet address (also known as a MAC address).

4.Netstat

Command-line tool that displays network connections (both incoming and outgoing), routing tables, and a number of network interface and network protocol statistics.

5.Nbtstat

Diagnostic tool for NetBIOS over TCP/IP. It is included in several versions of Microsoft Windows. Its primary design is to help troubleshoot NetBIOS name resolution problems.

6.NSLookup

Network administration command-line tool available for many computer operating systems for querying the Domain Name System (DNS) to obtain domain name or IP address mapping or for any other specific DNS record.