Troubleshoot IP Configuration and Routing Issues.
Yeah, networking is a big subject for sure.
I mentioned at the end of the previous module that
Microsoft Azure support receives the majority of their
support tickets in the networking arena.
What do we have available in‑box in Windows server to
help us with network connectivity, IP configuration,
and routing problems.
While I like to divide these tools, all of them are command line tools,
into two sections.
The first section, old school compiled executables, which are convenient.
You may have developed muscle memory with these commands,
but unfortunately they don't have a standardized syntax like PowerShell.
You're probably familiar with ipconfig.exe.
That is one of my very favorite Windows networking commands.
Ping, which gets a bad rap, on one hand,
because the internet control message protocol has been
subject to so much abuse that many businesses rightly
disable ping on network interfaces.
I'm going to show you some techniques to work around that.
The idea is that if a destination host responds to a ping, it's up, it's online.
Now that's not necessarily true.
Just because the machine responds to a ping doesn't necessarily mean
that it's say web FTP service is actually running.
ARP is a lower level command where you can validate that IP
addresses are bound correctly to media access control,
or MAC, hardware addresses.
That's for some lower to the ground troubleshooting with switches
and routers and individual network interfaces.
As far as verifying latency and reachability from a routing perspective,
we have tracert, we also have netstat to show us network statistics.
Now,
these are definitely all commands that you need to have
some familiarity with for your AZ‑801.
There are plenty of others, of course,
but I've told you at the beginning of this course and all of these AZ‑800
and 801 courses that I'm very strategic in my teaching,
I don't want to over teach stuff that's not going to be on the exam.
I will say though, parenthetically,
you might want to check out the Microsoft Sysinternals Suite.
This is a collection of free graphical and command line utilities,
some of which are very helpful like TCP view for
visualizing network connections on a machine.
If you're concerned about maybe a rogue process attached to a server,
this would be a good way to check that.
Now PowerShell, especially with PowerShell 7 being cross‑platform,
gives us a wrapper for the .NET Framework or .NET Core runtime
environment and also gives us a consistent syntax,
which I like a lot.
There are a few commands here that we'll look at in the demo,
Get‑NetIPConfiguration, Get‑NetIPAddress.
These are in some cases variants of ipconfig actually.
Test‑NetConnection is a much more expansive type of ping.
I like Test‑NetConnection because you're not using the
Internet Control Message Protocol, and you can test other ports.
For instance, if you're testing connectivity to a web server,
you can specify port 443, instead of no port,
you see?
Get‑NetRoute is an alternative to route print,
which is a compiled executable that's not on this slide,
but I'll show it to you in the demo,
a way to view the local routing table of a given
Windows server or Windows client system.
These are all good commands you should have in your toolbelt,
and their benefit, another benefit of both the executables in the PowerShell,
is that their in‑box on every Windows server system.
So you don't have any dependencies on any additional
troubleshooting software when you're looking to resolve
networking problems on these Windows servers.
Many of these commands can be just as useful in Azure as on‑premises.
I know it's a common newcomers mistake,
and I'll even say an intermediate Azure users mistake,
to assume that just because the Azure virtual
networks are out of our physical reach, that is they're in the cloud,
it's software‑defined networking,
means that we have to learn an entirely different
collection of troubleshooting tools.
Now it's really more of a both/and as opposed to an either/or situation. I hope that gives you some confidence and comfort.