Change Network location from Public to Private in Windows 8.1

If we are using Windows 8 or 8.1 at home or at work, and others cannot access shared folders on our PCs, then maybe our network profile is set to Public as default. If we are lucky, follow this post can help us change the profile to Private to enable file sharing http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/18934-change-network-location-from-public-to-private-in-windows-8.

However, on my Windows 8 or 8.1 PCs, I cannot right click on the Network icon to change the profile as instructed, so there is another way.

How to use nslookup tool on Windows to query a DNS server

It seems weird to talk about how to use nslookup tool on Windows. Almost every sys admin has used nslookup. I just want to mention some options in nslookup since all I have done so far is to type nslookup in a command prompt, then type a hostname or an IP. I used to change my DNS IP in network connection in case I need to query from another DNS server, and as I was looking for a tool to do that without changing the IP in network connection, I got my answer with nslookup /?

To query from a DNS server, we can either
nslookup <hostname> <DNS server IP>
Ex: nslookup google.com 8.8.8.8

or for interactive mode
nslookup - <DNS server IP>
Ex: nslookup - 8.8.8.8

Change Windows Server 2012 network profile to Private

As default, Windows Server (R2) 2012 set its network profile to Public. Not as in Windows Server 2008 in which we can change profile via GUI, in Server 2012, we can change via Windows PowerShell (It seems that MS is forcing us to go back to command line OS)

1. Open Windows PowerShell
2. Run Set-NetConnectionProfile -NetworkCategory Private
3. Check if the profile has changed by running Get-NetConnectionProfile