My previous posts were about things that required a pretty thorough understanding of specific technologies. I mean they were hard. So here’s an easier one. This post contains instructions on how to use basic network troubleshooting commands to narrow down the reason behind why the Internet isn’t working on your computer the day you really need it to get that stuff done.
Difficulty: Level 1
- Open the Start Menu
- Go to All Programs (or Programs, depending on your Windows configuration)
- Go to Accessories
- Under Accessories, click Command Prompt
- This window opens:
- Type
ipconfigand press enter - A list of information will appear, you’re looking for IP Address (or IPv4 address if you’re using Vista) and Default Gateway.
- To make things a little more clear, I’ll pretend my IP address is 192.168.0.101 and my default gateway is 192.168.0.1. Your address and gateway will probably be different but both will be in the form of X.X.X.X where X is a number.
- You just learned the
ipconfigcommand, which tells you some basic information about your computer’s network card’s configuration. - In the command prompt type
pingfollowed by your default gateway, so for me the full command would beping 192.168.0.1 - Press enter. You should get four Reply messages. If you get a message that doesn’t say “Reply from …” then either there’s a problem with your computer’s network card or the default gateway (which is actually your router or modem). If you do an ipconfig and see your computer still has an IP address, it’s likely a problem with your gateway.
- Now ping an address on the Internet, such as www.technicallyamusing.com. You should get 4 replies. If you don’t get replies but you could ping your default gateway, there’s something wrong between the gateway (usually your cable or DSL modem) and the connection to the ISP. Your computer’s settings are likely fine.
- If you don’t get any replies from the Internet address, try pinging 4.2.2.1, if you get replies from that but not from pinging a domain name (like technicallyamusing.com), you have a DNS configuration problem. You’ll probably need to contact someone who can help you correct that as it’s beyond the scope of this post.
- Okay, now type
tracert www.technicallyamusing.comand hit enter - Tracert (short for traceroute) shows you the entire path your data takes when going to a specific destination. Let it run for a little bit and watch it display the “hops” as it goes. Each hop represents a new network, each network in turn passes the data on to another network until the data gets to where it’s supposed to go. The tracert command just displays each hop to you. The path the data takes and any hop on that path may change each time data is sent due to the way networks work. It’s kind of cool to see it in action though.
- If when you’re running the tracert command you notice that everything after a certain hop is all asterisks, then the first hop that’s an asterisk is a network that is having a problem forwarding your data on for some reason.
So to sum up, the commands covered were ipconfig, ping, and tracert. These are very useful commands and can be used in much more powerful ways than demonstrated above. For any command prompt …command… you can look at the various options the command offers by typing /? after the command.
Networking The Basics by .
A little while ago, I was asked to see if there was a way to make some phones at a site ring with a unique ring type when internal calls were made. So if Person A dialed Person B down the hall, the phone would ring the “Internal Ring” while if a call came in from outside the office the ring would be whatever the person had chosen on their phone.
The office in question has a variety of Polycom SoundPoint IP phones and uses Trixbox as the PBX. I searched the Trixbox forums and Googled like mad to figure out how to do this. None of the instructions or guides I found worked for this office, others seemed to have had better luck, but for whatever reason the recommendations weren’t working for me.
Eventually I took an approach that uses bits and pieces from the information I found and now I’ve successfully configured not only the distinctive internal call ring but also another ring for the intercom feature.
Difficulty: Level 3
These instructions have been tested and verified to work on Polycom Soundpoint IP 501, 450, 650, and 330 phones running BootROM 4.1.2 and SIP 3.1.2. The Trixbox version used is Trixbox CE 2.6. These instructions do not apply to any non-Polycom phones. Other Polycom SoundPoint models or BootROM/SIP versions may not work.
Read on after the jump for how to get this working.
Read the rest of Trixbox/Polycom: Configure Custom Internal Ring »
Recently I implemented a public WiFi hotspot and needed an easy way for the office’s staff to manage users and passwords for the hotspot. My original solution relied on third party hosted management that was great until the site hosting the management started having issues. So I decided to use the Captive Portal feature of pfSense to allow complete on-site control.
But I quickly learned that pfSense does not have a feature that allows different user roles for management. This will be a feature in the next version of pfSense but the latest production version (1.2.2) doesn’t have the feature. Well I wanted the staff at the location to be able to manage Captive Portal users, but I didn’t want to give them access to every feature. So I hacked together excatly what I needed.
Then as soon as the next version of pfSense is released all of my effort will no longer matter. But until then my hack does the job. You can read how to do the entire hack after the jump.
Read the rest of Limited pfSense Captive Portal User Management »
Hacks Networking Security Web by .