How to Manage Windows Network Settings

Netsh, which is short for net shell, is a powerful command-line tool that is installed by default on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and recent Server editions. It lets you view and change TCP/IP, authentication, firewall, and other network settings. The beauty is that you can configure multiple computers by using a logon script or other means, such as a batch file.

Without this you have to bring up the GUIs for the network settings on each computer and manually modify them. Instead, you can write a script and run it from one PC to push the changes to all the others, or take a batch file around to each and make the changes with one click. This takes much less clicking, typing and time.

We'll discover a few different things you can do with the Netsh commands. More specifically, we'll review how to view and modify the IP settings for adapters and how to manage Windows Firewall. Let's get started!