Useful Windows Networking Tools
I spent awhile after work today trying to figure out why my mapped drives in windows weren’t working. I kept getting “MSHOME is not accessible” which was annoying because I wanted to watch some cartoons. Turns out that I booted my Linux box first and it became the master browser so I had to turn off my samba server and allow the windows xp machine to become the master browser. I found this out by using these commands and tools.
For informational purposes theres
net config server
net config workstation
ipconfig /all
Those commands can be helpful at times but I found that they do not give enough information about the computer browsing services.
I found a tool called Browstat that you can download for free that gives you the clues to properly debug your windows network. Once you’ve downloaded that file and put it in your C:\Windows folder you’re going to want to open up a command window and type: browstat status.
This will give you most of the information that you need to debug your network.
If anyone knows about any other great networking tools like browstat I would really like to know about them.
May 25th, 2009 at
“nbtstat” (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc940106.aspx) is good one. Especially for tracking down problems like you described.
Some of my other favorites:
netcat
wireshark
nmap
(nice theme btw) :-)
May 25th, 2009 at
wireshark and nmap are especially useful for debugging general networking problems all around. I’ve never used netcat before but it looks like a nice new toy to play with.