CS458/558 - Network Management - Lab 8

The following assignment is intended to provide you with experience in working with TCP/IP. You may do this assignment in groups of 2 students.

• A great deal of common sense
• Asystematic and logical approach to troubleshooting
• A solid knowledge of each protocol in use on your network

Examining the Six-Step Troubleshooting Procedure

1. Recognizing symptoms
2. Elaborating on symptoms
3. Listing probable faults
4. Localizing the faulty function
5. Localizing and repairing the actual problem
6. analyzing the failure

Troubleshooting Tools

1. Event Viewer - Displays the system, security and application logs
2. Performance Monitor - measures the computer=s efficiency, identifies and troubleshoots possible problems. [plans for additional hardware needs]
3. Task Manager - monitors active applications and processes on the computer. Can be used to start and stop applications and processes.
4. NT Diagnostics - enables viewing hardware information in the Registry (loaded device drivers & IRQ values).
5. Network Monitor (netmonitor) - determines problems during session initialization and problems related to broadcast storms. Troubleshoots network packets for transmission problems between computers.
6. TCP/IP Utilities - verifies and debugs TCP/IP networking problems
   1. ping - used to test if another computer is "alive"
   2. tracert - traces the route taken to another computer on the Internet
   3. netstat - shows static information at a given point in time; used to determine status of connections
   4. nslookup - checks records, domain host aliases, etc. by querying the Internet domain name servers
   5. route - prints the IP route table
   6. hostname - prints the name of the current host
   7. ipconfig - displays the current TCP/IP network configuration values
   8. arp - displays the ARP (address resolution protocol) table on the local computer
   9. winipcfg - displays information about the ip configuration including the NICs physical address
   10. nbtstat - lists the Remote Cache Name Table and the Local Name Table

   Log onto the Linux or NT host to do the following:

   1. ping uses ICMP to send an ECHO_REQUEST to elicit an ICMP ECHO_REPONSE from the secifed host.
      Use ping to test several sites on the Internet and record the average response time for each site.
      1. Determine the approximate distances to the following sites:
         • London (www.oxford.ac.uk)
         • Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia (www.ums.edu.my)
         • Bloomington, IN (www.iu.edu)
         • Mexico City (www.unam.mx)
         • Los Angeles (www.usc.edu)
         • Las Vegas, NM (www.nmhu.edu)
      2. Ping each of the sites above sending 64 bytes, 10 times and record the average response time. (e.g. ping jaring.nmhu.edu -l 64 -n 10)
      3. Draw an X-Y graph comparing the distances with the average response times.
      4. Pick two of the off-campus sites and ping the sites with messages of 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 bytes. Graph the message size versus RTT for these sites as well as www.nmhu.edu

   2. tracert or traceroute examines the path an ICMP message takes from source to destination
      Use tracert to determine the number of hops between your computer and the the six sites listed above. Graph the number of hops versus the distance.

   3. ftp is a file transfer program that uses the FTP protocol. File transfers are extended bursts of data and are good for analyzing network traffic.
      1. Log onto your account on a Linux computer, create a subdirectory ftplab and start a script file by typing
         script ftplab.scr
      2. You will transfer the following four files from jaring.nmhu.edu to your subdirectory ftplab: (template.htm, mountain.gif, sheep.exe, and cork.zip):
         • ftp jaring.nmhu.edu
         • cd /ftplab
         • prompt
         • binary
         • get each file
         • bye
         • end the script [CTRL+D]
      3. Login to three other computers and repeat this procedure.
      4. Use the script files (either print them or use more to extract the information to analyze the data and answer the following questions:
         • How many people were logged onto the computer during your tests? (use who)
         • What is the theoretical transfer rate over Ethernet?
         • Which files came in quickest? Why? How does this compare to the theoretical transfer rate?
         • Did any other factors affect the network traffic while you were running your tests?
         • What kind of relationship does the numer of connections have to network traffic flow? Why?
   4. Use netstat to find the active TCP connections. Describe what you found.

   5. Use netstat to find information on the routing tables. Describe what you found.

   6. Use netstat to view the statistics for the behavior of the network protocols. Explain your observations

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   written by Wayne Summers wsummers@nmhu.edu