WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL

VIEW AND MODIFY A COMPUTER'S ROUTING TABLE

Most computers rely on a gateway of some type to route traffic for them. For example, your network likely connects to the Internet through a router, and that router takes care of directing packets, whether incoming or outgoing, to where they need to go. If you have multiple network segments in your organization, your network might also include other routers.

In most situations, you don't need to worry about viewing or changing your local computer's routing table. Sometimes, however, the ability to view and modify your routing table can come in quite handy for troubleshooting purposes or even working around network configuration issues.

The Route command offers the ability to view and modify a computer's routing table. To view a computer's routing table, enter ROUTE PRINT at the command line.

The command prints a list of all known routes with the address and subnet mask of the destination, the gateway for the specified address, the interface to which it applies, and the route's metric.

The computer uses the last value to determine which route to use when routing traffic to the specified address. Whenever possible, computers use routes with lower metrics.

If necessary, you can refine the list of routes displayed for readability. For example, let's say you want to view only routes for a subnet beginning with the 192 octet. If so, you would use the following command to print only those routes:

ROUTE PRINT 192*