Third-Party Utilities

Besides the utilities provided with Windows XP, there are some third-party tools that you can use to help diagnose your connection and gather Internet information. I'll describe three Web-based utilities and one commercial software package.

Speed Check

Ever wondered how to find the real-world transfer rate of your Internet connection? Intel Corporation has a nifty Web-based program to measure transfer speeds using a Java applet. Check out www.intel.com/personal/do_more/broadband/speedtest.htm. (Every time I put this URL into print, Intel seems to feel the need to change it. If you get a "page not found" error, search the Intel site for "broadband speed test.")

Whois Database

Anyone registering an Internet domain name is required to file contact information with a domain registry. This is public information, and you can use it to find out how to contact the owners of a domain whose customers have sent spam mail or with whom you have other concerns.

Finding the registrar for a given domain name can be a bit of a bother. You can find the registrar information for any .aero, .arpa, .biz, .com, .coop, .edu, .info, .int, .museum, .net, or .org domain via the following Web page:

www.internic.net/whois.html

The search results from this page will indicate the URL of the whois lookup page for the associated domain registrar. Enter the domain name again on that page and you should be shown the contact information.

It's a bit harder to find the registrar associated with two-letter country code domains ending in, for example, .au, .de, .it, and so on. The InterNIC site recommends searching through www.uwhois.com.

You can find the owner of an IP address through a similar lookup at www.arin.net/whois. Enter an IP address to find the owner of the block of IP addresses from which the specific address was allocated. This is usually an ISP, or in some cases, an organization that has had IP addresses assigned to it directly.

Reverse TRacert

As I discussed earlier, the tracert program investigates the path that data you send through the Internet takes to reach another location. Interestingly, data coming back to you can take a different path. Users of older satellite Internet service know this already as their outbound data goes through a modem, while incoming data arrives by satellite. It turns out that this can happen even with standard Internet service, depending on the way your ISP has set up its own internal network.

It's handy to know how the path data takes coming to you. If you record this information while your Internet connection is working, then if you run into trouble you can have a friend perform a tracert to you (you'll need to give him or her your IP address, which you can find using the ipconfig command). If the results differ you may be able to tell whether the problem is with your computer, your ISP, or the Internet.

You can visit http://www.traceroute.org for a list of hundreds of Web servers that can perform a traceroute test from their site to you. Don't be surprised if the test results take a while to appear as these tests typically take a minute or more.

WS_Ping Pro Pack

If you want to be really well equipped to handle Internet and general networking problems, you can buy third-party utilities that are really much easier to use than the standard ones built into Windows. I really like WS_Ping ProPack from Ipswitch Software (www.ipswitch.com). This one utility packs almost all the TCP/IP tools into one graphical interface and adds other features such as whois for domain registration lookups, SNMP probing, and network scanning. The registration fee is $37.50 U.S. for a single-user license. I rarely use or like add-ons like this, but I use this program every few days for one reason or another, and it quickly made my "must have" list.