Windows Vista in a Nutshell

Networking and Internet Command-Line Tools

For many networking and troubleshooting tasks, your best bet is to use command-line tools. This section covers the networking command-line tools built into Vista.

Connection Manager Profile Installer: \windows\system32\cmstp.exe

An automated connection profile installation utility.

To open

Command Prompt → cmstp

Description

You use the Connection Manager Profile Installer to automate the installation (or removal) of connection profiles. For example, an ISP or network administrator may build an .inf file containing all the necessary information to connect to another computer or service, and then use the Connection Manager Profile Installer to integrate the information into a particular computer. Type cmstp at any prompt for information on its usage.

Finger: \windows\system32\finger.exe

Display information about a user account.

To open

Command Prompt → finger

Usage

finger [-l] [user][@host]

Description

The Finger client uses a standard protocol to retrieve publicly available information from any networked computer that is running the Finger daemon. Let’s say you want to find out about the username “Woodrow” on your own system; you would simply type:

finger woodrow

Finger accepts the following options:

user

The username you want to query. Omit to list all the users currently logged in on the specified host.

@host

The target machine containing the user account(s) you want to query. Omit to query the local machine (localhost). ...