The Utterances of a Peculiar Mindset

In our NL (Networking Laboratory) oral, some of us were asked to type command “ipconfig /all” at command prompt and explain the things visible in the output of the command.
The information displayed on the screen is described below.

Adapter address

This is a hexadecimal address, also called the MAC address, unique to every network adapter. It is hard coded into the card by the manufacturer, and consists of six 8-bit numbers. However remember that modems do not have this address-this is restricted to network adapters-the number for a modem or dial up adapter is set to a meaningless default number.

This is the current IP networking address. Depending on whether the DHCP is used, this may be static or dynamically allotted. The static value is entered in the TCP/IP network configuration menu.

This is used to mask a portion of the IP address, to determine the subnet where the computer is located-within the internal network. All computers running TCP/IP must have the subnet mask defined.

This is the IP address of the computer that provides the connection to a remote network. The gateway computer is the computer that TCP/IP will use to communicate and route data destined for computers on remote networks.

This entry indicates the IP address of the DHCP server. The DHCP server, when present, will dynamically assign an IP address to the machine upon connecting to the network. Clicking on the Release button will release the IP address, and the Renew button requests a new IP address from the DHCP server.

These settings specify the IP address of the Primary and Secondary WINS Server, if present. The WINS servers translate the NetBIOS names into the corresponding IP addresses.

These values show when the current IP address was obtained and when it is due to expire. You can use the Release and Renew buttons to release and renew your current IP address. In any case, the DHCP client automatically attempts to renew the lease, when 50 per cent of the lease time has expired.