{"id":22843,"date":"2008-04-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-07T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/04\/07\/what-happened-to-winipcfg-and-netmon\/"},"modified":"2025-03-16T16:47:21","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T23:47:21","slug":"20080407-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080407-00\/?p=22843","title":{"rendered":"What happened to winipcfg and netmon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commenter Michael Moulton asks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Back in the Win95 & 98 days, we had winipcfg to manage DHCP leases on the client. Additionally, we had an app (I think it was netmon) to let you view people currently accessing your shares.<\/p>\n

Now, we have ipconfig on the command line and nothing like netmon.<\/p>\n

I’d be interested in hearing why those tools weren’t retained.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Let’s start with winipcfg<\/code>. On the Windows\u00a0NT side, the tool for managing IP addresses has always been ipconfig<\/code>, and it hasn’t gone away. It’s still there in Windows\u00a0Vista. The winipcfg<\/code> program was created for Windows\u00a03.1 as a workaround because Windows\u00a03.1 didn’t have a console subsystem. The program was retained in Windows\u00a095 because Windows\u00a095 was based on Windows\u00a03.1. The workaround wasn’t ported to Windows\u00a0NT because Windows\u00a0NT already had the functionality, as a console program, which is probably how it should have been done in the first place.<\/p>\n

Oh wait, that is<\/i> how it was done in the first place.<\/p>\n

In other words, the question isn’t why winipcfg<\/code> changed to ipconfig<\/code> but rather why ipconfig<\/code> changed to winipcfg<\/code>. The change was a workaround, and now the workaround is no longer needed.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the functionality provided by netmon<\/code> exists in the Windows\u00a0NT series as an MMC snap-in. The quickest way to get to it is to right-click the My Computer icon and select Manage<\/i>, then go to the Shared Folders node.<\/p>\n

(This question really wasn’t in my area, since I never worked on networking. I’m just answering the question based having used Windows for a while and not being afraid to look around.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

They’re still there, just in a different guise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-22843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

They’re still there, just in a different guise.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}