Command lines to setup IP address and DNS of Windows PC

When I use my Windows notebook as connectivity tester, I often have to switch the IP address configuration from DHCP to some fixed IP, and back and forth. Also, different customers have different assigned fixed IP addresses.

Net workers' nightmare came true. Lesson from April 21 outage of Amazon.com

The incident summary of April 21 outage of Amazon.com has been published for a while. It reminds me some typical nightmares of an Net worker like me.

The "prelude" of that incident was because of network execution error, as this:

..... The configuration change was to upgrade the capacity of the primary network. During the change, one of the standard steps is to shift traffic off of one of the redundant routers in the primary EBS network to allow the upgrade to happen. The traffic shift was executed incorrectly and rather than routing the traffic to the other router on the primary network, the traffic was routed onto the lower capacity redundant EBS network. .....

"April 21 2011" incident of Amazon.com: not the end of the "Cloud Era"

Many reports (such as this) mentioned the "April 21 2011" incident of Amazon.com.

If Amazon.com does not lie on its status history, this incident looks to me quite controlled and not that surprising! The failures are almost contained in North Virgina data center.

No more IPv4 unicast addresses in IANA's pool since Feburary 2011. Be cautious, but not panic!

It does NOT mean "the world ran out of ALL IPv4 addresses" now. It only means no more IPv4 unicast addresses are "as reserves". There are still some in five RIRs' pool today!

(However, it is quite close. When those in RIRs are also used up soon after, then we can really say "no more IPv4 addresses".)

This is just an important reminder for you to speed up your migration to IPv6! However, as I pointed out before, don't get panic about this!

No more HyperTerminal on Windows 7? Try Putty!

  Bits per sec    :  9600  
  Data bits       :     8 
  Parity          :  none 
  Stop bits       :     1 
  Flow control    :  none 

(This post is re-posted in English from my original post.)

We are all used to start HyperTerminal included in old Microsoft Windows XP to do initial console configurations of routers and switches. However, starting from Windows Vista (and also Windows 7), no HyperTerminal software anymore! Now how can we do console configuration in Windows Vista or Windows 7?

In fact, Putty, the software we use as daily Secure Shell (SSH) client, can also be used to do console configuration on routers and switches.