In this lesson, I will discuss Windows networking. Windows networking is important to understand because we can't just plug in an Ethernet cable all the time, and make sure that it works. Sometimes we don't have a DHCP server that we need to connect to. We need to manually go in and configure IP addresses, manually configure security, manually configure sharing options as well. Let's look at this real quick. As you notice down here, this icon represents that my Internet connection is up and running. If I didn't have Internet, I would have a yellow triangle with an exclamation point through it. Now if you weren't connected at all, it would actually have a red X. So let's just do that real quick, and I will turn off networking. Okay, we'll disconnect, and there it is. Notice how, if I'm not connected, this shows up as red. Let's connect this back real quick. Okay, there's my yellow triangle as you saw, okay. Identifying, and no Internet access, and if I hover over it again it shows that I have Internet access. So if we click on it, we can go to Network Settings. In Network Settings, I have information that allows me to change networking in general. Let's change the actual adapter settings. So here we have Change adapter settings. And this is going to bring up all our Ethernet connections. So if I had another network interface card, which actually, let's add one real quick. So now you can see that I have two Ethernet adapters, okay, Ethernet0 and Ethernet1. Now I do have a lot of options if I have more than one NIC installed in my system. However, we're just going to talk about one, okay. I can bridge connections if I wanted to with both of these connections. But I'm not going to at the moment, so let's just focus on Ethernet0. If I click Properties, I have many different options. The most common option that we're going to configure is this one right here, Internet Protocol Version 4 TCP/IPv4. So if you click on that, you can either double-click it or click Properties. And it'll bring up where we can configure our IP addresses. Typically, we're going to obtain an address automatically. However, if you don't have a DHCP server available, we can enter this information in. We do need the IP address, the subnet mask, and the default gateway. Additionally, one thing that we may configure without obtaining the IP address automatically is DNS. DNS servers can be changed, depending on which network that you want to configure, or where you want to connect. So we'll use Google's resolver, so 8.8.8.8. This is Google's open resolver, it will translate addresses for us. Let's click OK, all right, we'll click Close. All right, this network is still available. Let's go ahead and disable this one real quick. If we need to disable a interface for some reason, or re-enable it, or maybe there is potentially something wrong with it, we can disable it from here, and now it's disabled. Now because I'm an administrator on this system at the moment, you'll notice that UAC, Universal Access Control, is actually turned off. Universal Access Control is allowing me to change the settings without saying yes or no. I'm going to press the Start button, and go to the command prompt. It'll either be up here if you've used it more often than not, or I can just start typing in cmd. Okay, and I'll press Enter. And if I type in ipconfig, notice how it gives me real quick information on my Ethernet address, okay? It's not going to give me the second Ethernet connection that we'd configured, because it's disabled at the moment. If I enabled it, then it would give me the long list. So notice that my IPv4 address, my subnet mask and my default gateway are all filled out. What I don't have is information on DNS and my actual physical address, the layer 2 address of my Ethernet card. So let's type in that real quick. So I'm going to press the up arrow, say /all. So here's my physical address, and this is the MAC address of Ethernet0, right here. Here's my DNS servers. Notice how it's 8.8.8.8, which we set just a minute ago. Okay, we also have tunnel adapter, and any other interfaces that we have enabled will show up here. If you're running virtual machines on your system, it will be much, much longer. Let's exit out of this for a minute. Some of the other things that you may configure, and we need to pay attention to when we're doing system administration on Windows, is sharing. Sharing introduces some issues with security, especially this. So I just clicked on Change advanced sharing options. Network discovery, network discovery usually should be turned off. Now you may want that on if you're planning to share with other users, share files maybe. You can also share it down here as well, turn on file and print sharing functionality. Your administrator may have that turned off. And you can also configure this setting as well through Active Directory, which we'll talk about here in a couple of lessons. Let's Cancel out of this right now. Before we cancel out, if we drop down, we can look at private and we can look at public or guest networks. Now private would be in the case of, if we're on the domain, for example, okay? So let's Cancel, and let's click Windows Firewall, okay? Windows Firewall allows us to basically manipulate any of the configuration for the firewall on our systems. Since this is a Windows 2016 server, we have a lot of options where we can turn things on or off. Typically, we don't want to do this. We don't want to just turn off the firewall. It's on by default, so we won't do that. Let's look at Advanced settings however real quick, okay? So domain profile, private profile, inbound rules, outbound rules. Whenever you create or install software on Windows server, it's going to automatically create rules for that. So if we want to turn certain things on or off, we're going to have to come in here and set new policies, okay? So I just clicked on Windows Firewall Properties. Your Domain Profile Firewall state is on, Inbound connection is Block, Outbound connections Allow. And if I turned each of these off, they're going to manipulate how I can send and receive packets, okay? Additionally, we have logging. Logging gives us a lot of control over how we audit our systems. So maybe this is a sensitive system, and we need to audit all connections coming in and out. So in this lesson, I've talked a little bit about Windows networking and where you go to configure different options. The most important features that we need to look at when managing systems, especially Windows systems, is the firewall to make sure that they're turned on. And additionally, that file sharing is not turned on.
