HANDS-ON 1-8

1. Start your Web browser and go to www.acronymfinder.com.

2. You can look up acronyms by typing them in the “Abbreviation to define” text box at the top and clicking the Find
button. If there’s more than one common definition for an acronym, Acronym Finder lists them by popularity
ranking. Look up the following acronyms; you’ll need some of them later:

TCP/IP
Wi-Fi

Though Wi-Fi is not an acronym, Wi-Fi stands for Wireless Fidelity. Wi-Fi is a wireless networking
technology that allows devices such as computers, mobile devices, and other equipment to interface with
the Internet. It allows these devices--and many more--to exchange information with one another, creating a
network. Internet connectivity occurs through a wireless router. When you access Wi-Fi, you are connecting
to a wireless router that allows your Wi-Fi-compatible devices to interface with the Internet. (Cisco, 2023)

SSID
WEP

OSI
Ping

According to Zola (2021), Ping is a command-line program designed to allow network admins to track
the availability status of different devices in a network. It also helps discover network connectivity and
latency issues.

UTP

Cat6

Category 6 is an Ethernet cable standard defined by the Electronic Industries Association and
Telecommunications Industry Association. Cat 6 is the sixth generation of twisted pair Ethernet cabling that
is used in home and business networks. Cat 6 cabling is backward compatible with the Cat 5 and Cat 5e
standards that preceded it. (LinkedIn, 2020)

EMI
RJ-45

3. Bookmark Acronymfinder.com for future use and exit your browser. Shut down your computer, unless you’re
continuing to the case projects.

Reference

Cisco. (2023). What Is Wi-Fi? Cisco. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/wireless/what-is-wifi.html

Zola, A. (2021, July). What Is a Ping and How Does it Work? TechTarget.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/ping

LinkedIn. (2020, December 2). A Guide to Cat 6 Ethernet Cables. Lifewire. https://www.lifewire.com/cat6-ethernet-
cable-standard-817553
 HANDS-ON 2-6
1. Log on to your computer as NetAdmin, if necessary, and open a command prompt window.

2. Type tracert www.yahoo.com and press Enter. You should see output that’s similar to Figure 2-24, but the details
will vary, depending on your location. In this output, there are five columns of information. The first column is just a
count of how many routers the packet traversed. The second, third, and fourth columns show the amount of time
in milliseconds (ms) the router took to respond. Three packets are sent, so three times are listed. The last column
is the router’s IP address or name and IP address.
3. You can garner some information about the geography of the path your packet took by looking at the router’s
name. For example, in Figure 2-24, the domain name of the first router is yc-cnt.edu, which is a router at Yavapai
College in Prescott, Arizona, where this book has been written. Other routers have the domain name yahoo.com,
which tells you that the router is on Yahoo’s network. You get the idea. However, looking up router names can
sometimes make the trace run slowly. To do the same trace without looking up names, type tracert -d
www.yahoo.com and press Enter. This time, you should see only the IP address of each router.

4. Try using traceroute and various Web sites to determine the path packets take to other destinations. Try
books.tomsho.com, and for a destination on the East Coast, try www.cengage.com. For a destination in Germany,
try www.kontron.de. If the trace repeatedly times out (as indicated by a * symbol in the output), press Ctrl+C to
stop the trace.
5. Close the command prompt window and shut down your computer, unless you’re continuing to the critical
thinking activities at the end of the chapter.
 HANDS-ON 5-3
1. If necessary, log on to your computer as NetAdmin and open a command prompt window. Start a Web browser
and navigate to a Web site, such as www.cengage.com. Exit your browser.

2. To see the DNS resolver cache, type ipconfig /displaydns and press Enter. To delete the entries, type ipconfig
/flushdns and press Enter. Display the DNS resolver cache again. Unless there are entries in your hosts file, you
should get the message “Could not display the DNS Resolver Cache.”

3. To perform a DNS lookup, type ping www.cengage.com and press Enter. Display the DNS cache again. You
should see a DNS record for www.cengage.com that includes the IP address and other information. Another field in
the DNS cache is a TTL value, which is different from the TTL in an IP packet. This DNS TTL value is sent by the DNS
server maintaining the www.cengage.com record. It’s measured in seconds and tells your DNS client how long to
cache the DNS record as a safeguard against clients holding on to DNS records whose IP addresses might have
changed.

4. To open your computer’s hosts file, right-click Start, click Run, type Notepad, and press Enter. Click File and
then click Open from the Notepad menu. In the Open dialog box, navigate to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc. In
the File type drop-down list, click All Files. Double-click the hosts file to open it.
 5. After the last line in the file, type 67.210.126.125 books. Save the file by clicking File and then Save; in the File
name text box, type “hosts”. (You must include the quotation marks so that Notepad doesn’t save the file with the
.txt extension.) Click Desktop in the Save As dialog box; you can’t replace this file using Notepad because of
Windows file protection. Click Save, and exit Notepad.

6. Open File Explorer, navigate to the desktop, and copy the hosts file you just saved. Then navigate to
C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc and paste the file there. When prompted to confirm, click Replace the file in the
destination. When prompted, click Continue. Close File Explorer.
 7. At the command prompt, type ipconfig /displaydns and press Enter to see that the entry is in your DNS cache.
Type ping books and press Enter. Delete the DNS resolver cache (see Step 2), and then display it again. Notice that
the books entry remains in the cache because the hosts file data always stays in the cache.

8. Type nslookup www.cengage.com and press Enter. Your DNS server’s name and IP address are displayed along
with the name and IP address of www.cengage.com. You use nslookup to look up a host’s IP address without
actually communicating with it.

9. Type nslookup and press Enter. You enter interactive mode. Type www.yahoo.com and press Enter. You might
see more than one address along with one or more aliases (other names that www.yahoo.com goes by). Type
www.yahoo.com again (or press the up arrow to repeat the last line you typed) and press Enter. You should see the
IP addresses returned in a different order. (If you don’t, keep trying, and the order will change.) The www.yahoo.com
page can be reached by a number of different IP addresses, and the addresses are returned in a different order so
that a different server is used each time, which is called “round-robin load balancing.”

10. Type 198.60.123.100 and press Enter. Nslookup is also used to do reverse lookups, in which the IP address is
given, and the hostname is returned.

11. To set the DNS server that nslookup uses to a public DNS server run by Google, type server 8.8.8.8 and press
Enter. Type www.microsoft.com and press Enter. If you’re ever concerned that your DNS server isn’t working
correctly, you can test it with nslookup and compare the results of your DNS server with the results from another
server, such as Google’s.
12. Leave the command prompt window open for the next project.
 HANDS-ON 7-2
1. In the left column of the table, write the OSI model layer number, and in the right column, write the
corresponding layer name.

OSI model layer number OSI model layer name

Layer 1 Physical Layer
Layer 2 Data Link Layer
Layer 3 Network Layer
Layer 4 Transport Layer
Layer 5 Session Layer
Layer 6 Presentation Layer
Layer 7 Application Layer
 HANDS-ON 7-3
1. Draw lines from each OSI model layer name in the left column of the table to the corresponding description of
the OSI model layer. Note that the layer names are not in order.