EIW Exercises: General Networking and the Internet

1. Find Your Own IP Address

From the start menu select run. Type winipcfg and click on OK (winipcfg stands for "Windows IP Configuration").

Select your Ethernet Adapter, and record the IP address assigned to your machine. You can click on "More Info" and find out when your address expires, the IP address of the DHCP server, etc.

2. Look at your routing table

Bring up a DOS prompt window by selecting "MS-DOS Prompt" from the program menu. If the DOS window shows up as full-screen - press Alt-Enter to switch it to a smaller window.

At the DOS prompt type in the command "route print". Record the default route (the default route is shown as the network address 0.0.0.0) and any other network routes that are displayed. Network routes have a netmask that is anything other than 255.255.255.255.

3. Find the length of the path from your machine to a few web servers on the Internet.

In order to do this you will need to find some software that can trace out a complete route. Feel free to find any software you can, although I suggest a demo version of VisualRoute. You can find out about VisualRoute at http://www..visualroute.com, or you can skip the annoying registration screen and download the file directly by clicking here (save the file and run it to install VisualRoute).

You must complete the following:

  1. Find and record the complete path from your machine to www.cs.rpi.edu
  2. Find the length of the route from your machine to www.amazon.com
  3. Find the length of the route from your machine to olympic.datops.com. How many continents are the packets routed through?

If you installed VisualRoute, you won't need it for EIW again (although it's a useful utility) and can remove it from your machine.