Network adapters and tools

However, some users report that the network is slow or disconnected randomly when using it. This is especially true for powerline adapters that use the old Home Plug AV technology. In many cases, the wires in the home are not set up for powerline Ethernet.

Other problems may be that the distance between the plugs is too large, and the power cord will suffer some interference. The MoCA adapter is another option. MoCA technology uses the existing coaxial TV wiring in people's homes and creates an ultra-fast and reliable home network. Also known as coaxial cable Ethernet. The MoCA adapter will not interfere like a wall plug adapter or direct WiFi, so it can establish a consistent high-speed connection between the router and the access point.

The network adapter enables devices to communicate through a local area network LAN and connect to the Internet or other computers. Another LOGICcard service is a feed of warnings to look out for, such as patches that cause problems and should be held off or new internet-based scams.

A guidance aspect to this service also identifies errors to avoid in network configuration and tips on how to optimize bandwidth usage. Furthermore, the topics covered by a LOGICcard feed adapt according to your responses to past advice.

The dashboard for N-able RMM is resident on the cloud. N-able RMM is a subscription service. This is a great attraction for startups because there are no upfront costs for getting set up. There are no setup fees and there is no need to fork out for a software package Instead, the subscribing company pays a little each month.

Interested potential customers can access a day free trial of N-able RMM. It can help you with troubleshooting because it can diagnose network issues right down the protocol stack and identify the root of the problem.

Port monitoring is one of the network diagnostics techniques that you can use with this tool. The PRTG system includes two port monitoring sensors. One homes in on a specified port on a particular device, the other will check a range of port numbers. This tool only monitors TCP ports. The port range sensor has one extra feature that the single port sensor does not have. You can set it to check the port with TLS protection. Both sensors report on the response time of the port and whether it is open or closed.

PRTG includes network traffic analysis tools to help you troubleshoot delivery speeds. The tool includes a range of traffic monitoring techniques including route tracing to a destination with Traceroute and a Ping sweep , which will give you the response times to each node on your network. A packet-sniffing utility can tell you which applications and endpoints are producing excessive traffic and you can query the health of the network devices to see which are congested to the point of queuing.

Paessler built a tool that covers servers and applications as well as network statuses, port response times, and services to monitor all conditions that can cause software performance issues. That monitoring is constant, so you will be able to trace back through events to spot the source of any performance issues. Paessler delivers PRTG as a cloud service or you can install the diagnostic software on your premises. The tool installs on Windows Server environments. You can use the system for free for up to sensors.

A successful ping confirms network connectivity between the two hosts and it also gives reports on packet loss. DNS is working on the local machine. That Loss figure that you see in the last line of the ping output is the number of lost packets followed by the packet loss rate in brackets. This makes it a helpful tool in determining where a network connectivity breakdown is occurring. Basically, tracert helps you understand if the router or network that is down between your computer and a remote host is one you control or not.

Again using google. Determining the IP settings on your computer is an essential part of network troubleshooting. The ipconfig command helps you do just that. Entering ipconfig at a command prompt will return IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, subnets, and default gateways for all network adapters on a PC. This can help determine if your computer has the right IP configuration.

Additionally, ipconfig can be used to change or update selected IP settings. Netstat allows you to display active connections on your local machine. This can be helpful when determining why users are unable to connect to a given application on a server or to determine what connections are made to remote hosts from a computer. Entering netstat at the command prompt will display all active TCP connections. Adding parameters to the netstat command will extend or alter the functionality.

There are a variety of use cases for this flexible utility and it can be run in interactive mode or by entering commands directly at the command prompt. The output above shows us that the DNS server used on our local machine was ns2.

Based on the output, we can see that the FQDN associated with 8. Sometimes you may need to determine what email servers are available on a domain. To do that, we simply need to specify that we are looking for MX records using the —ty switch. Here, five mail servers were returned along with an MX preference value. The lower the MX preference value, the higher the priority of that server i.

Sometimes you need to start troubleshooting by determining if the issue is with client computers accessing a website or with the website itself. There are many sites that can help you do just that. This can be especially helpful if you need to determine why some users can reach your site and others cannot. Alternatively, you may want a quick and easy way to test your upload and download speeds to see if you have a bandwidth or latency issue.

Our broadband speed test is a great way to do just that and help raise money for charity. Other tools can help measure network performance PsPing , scan file shares ShareEnum , list or run processes remotely PsTools , and more. If you only require one or a few of the Sysinternals utilities, you can install them separately as opposed to downloading the entire Sysinternals Suite.

Wireshark is a protocol analyzer and one of the go-to networking tools for organizations of all sizes when network issues need to be troubleshot with a high level of granularity. The benefit of using Wireshark to analyze network traffic is that you will be able to view the raw network packets, and this will often allow you to identify the root cause of an issue. This can be especially helpful in situations where it is unclear which application is not doing what it is supposed to or when you try to reverse engineer the functionality of a poorly-documented program.

The tradeoff here is that you will have a lot of data to parse through, so some technical knowledge may be required to drill down and identify the important information. On Windows operating systems, link-layer packet captures with WireShark are often made possible using Winpcap either Winpcap or Npcap is required. For a deeper dive on Winpcap, Windump, and tcpdump, check out our recent article on packet sniffers and network analyzers and download the tcpdump cheat sheet.

Wireshark is an excellent tool for processing packet data. There are a number of other tools that work well with Wireshark to create an even better data analysis system. Click Network Reset to reset network settings to default. Tip 6.

Other solutions to Troubleshoot network connection problems. Support recovering data from various data loss situations. MiniTool Partition Wizard — Easily manage hard drive partitions by yourself with this program. MiniTool ShadowMaker — Let you choose files and folders, partitions, or the whole disk content to back up to external hard drives, USB flash drives, etc. Easily backup and restore Windows OS.