Introduction

Every organization's heart is its network – the infrastructure that enables your client and server systems to interoperate. Windows has included networking features since the early days of Windows for Workgroups 3.1 (and earlier with Microsoft LAN Manager).

One thing worth noting is that even in the cloud age, "the network" isn't going anywhere; its role of enabling a client to connect to a server is just changing, with some servers (and clients) now in the cloud. The cloud is really just resources in someone else's network, and you still need the network to communicate.

Every server or workstation in your environment needs to have a correct IP configuration. While IPv6 is gaining in popularity, most organizations rely on IPV4. In the Configuring IP addressing recipe, we look at setting a network interface's IPv4 configuration, including DNS settings.

Many organizations assign a static IPv4 address to most server systems...