Restarting a Network Interface on a Windows system

I was unable to connect to a Microsoft Windows 10 Professional system from another Windows system after a power outage a couple of days ago, though the Windows 10 system, which was on an uninterruptible power supply, did not lose power, so had not rebooted, and the network switch between them was up and running nominally. I should have been able to connect to the system via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), but that didn't work. I installed UltraVNC on the Windows 10 system, but didn't get any response from that system when I tried connecting to it from the other Windows system using a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) client on that system. Yet I could successfully ping the Windows 10 system and when I issued a net view systemname command where systemname was the name of the Windows 10 system, from the other Windows system, I could see the shared resources.

I used WinDump, a network packet capture utility, which is a Windows equivalent to the tcpdump utility available for Linux, Unix, OS X, etc. systems, on the other Windows system. I found that when I tried establishing an RDP/VNC connection to the Windows 10 system, I saw the TCP packets going towards the Windows 10 system, but no resonses to those packets, though I did see DNS traffic coming from the Windows 10 system to the other system, which functions as a DNS server. When I used another free packet analyzer program on the Windows 10 system, Wireshark, that utility showed the incoming RDP packets destined for TCP port 3389, the registered port for RDP connections, and TCP port 5900, the registered port for VNC connections. But it didn't show the Windows 10 system sending any responses to those packets. I didn't want to reboot the Windows 10 system to fix the problem; I was able to resolve the problem by disabling then enbling the Local Area Network (LAN) interface on the Windows 10 system by opening a command prompt window with administrator privileges on that system.

I first issued the command netsh interface show interface to see the list of network interfaces on the system. Since the one named "Local Area Connection" was the only one in the "Connected" state, I disabled it with the command netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" admin=disable and then re-enabled the interface with the command netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" admin=enable. The Windows 10 system then responsded to TCP connection attempts to it and I was then able to establish RDP and VNC connections from the Windows server to the Windows 10 system.

c:\>netsh interface show interface

Admin State    State          Type             Interface Name
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enabled        Disconnected   Dedicated        Ethernet
Enabled        Disconnected   Dedicated        Wi-Fi
Enabled        Connected      Dedicated        Local Area Connection


c:\>netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" admin=disable


c:\>netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" admin=enable


c:\>

Remotely Restarting Windows Services or Systems