0 TCP IP INFORMATION WITH STEP 10

do so by pinging a host by name that has a DNS entry or WINS server configured.

Also, if your network is already attached to the Internet, you can test your gateway by pinging a host that you know is somewhere on the Internet. For example, you could try pinging the Windows NT Magazine Web server by typing ping www.winntmag.com. You should always get a response similar to the one shown in except that the response times might be a bit longer, because your packets have to travel across the Internet and back.
Now that you have installed TCP/IP on your Windows NT machine, I’ll remind you that you have made an excellent choice for a networking protocol. TCP/IP is absolutely the most performance-oriented protocol you can use, and when it comes to connecting to the Internet, there is simply no other choice.


SUMMARY
Now that we have a basic understanding of TCP/IP and how it works, it should be clear that TCP/IP has many advantages. When you use TCP/IP on an intranet with Windows NT, you gain one distinct advantage over using TCP/IP with other types of network operating systems: ease of configuration and use. You should also understand that literally hundreds of vendors are creating software for the Windows NT operating system, which obviously increases the likelihood of finding software that does what you need.

Another major advantage of using TCP/IP and Windows NT on your intranet is the cross-platform connectivity. TCP/IP is available for almost every operating system in production today. Because TCP/IP is a standard family of protocols, connecting dissimilar operating systems is a breeze. You can connect new systems to older legacy systems in a snap. For example, if your network is composed of Apple Macintosh systems, minicomputers, mainframes, Unix systems, IBM PCs running Novell, and IBM PC-compatible systems running some version of Windows, the components normally would not be able to communicate with each other at all. But with TCP/IP installed on each of them, they are all capable of communicating and transferring data back and forth with ease. This flexibility is not possible with any other networking protocol today.

TCP/IP is the revolution that the computer industry has needed for a long time; however, it has taken the vast popularity of the Internet to institute its wide-spread implementation. Here are some of the major benefits of using TCP/IP:

• TCP/IP is a routable protocol with the ability to send datagrams using a very specific route, which in turn reduces traffic on other parts of a network.
• TCP/IP has a lower overhead than other protocols, which allows much larger networks to be constructed.
• TCP/IP is reliable and has efficient data delivery mechanisms.
• TCP/IP is standardized for cross-platform implementation, making TCP/IP able to send data between computer systems running completely different operating systems, from PCs to mainframes and almost everything in between.
• TCP/IP provides a common addressing scheme across all operating system platforms.
• TCP/IP can run over a variety of network types including Ethernet, Token Ring, X.25, Frame Relay, and even dialup lines.