How Can I Fix Common Wifi Internet Issues

Understanding How Internet Addressing Functions When using the Internet, you will receive a Public IPv4 address such as 19.34.37.226 or an IPv6 address like 2000:df31:17f4:b5b5:e6e:20b3:4435:b4d1. You can verify this by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, attempting to convey these addresses to non-technical individuals or even mentioning MAC addresses like 91:18:5f:f0:d7:c9 can quickly become complex and error-prone. Understanding How Internet Addressing Functions When using the Internet, you will receive a Public IPv4 address such as 19.34.37.226 or an IPv6 address like 2000:df31:17f4:b5b5:e6e:20b3:4435:b4d1. You can verify this by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, attempting to convey these addresses to non-technical individuals or even mentioning MAC addresses like 91:18:5f:f0:d7:c9 can quickly become complex and error-prone.

Understanding How Internet Addressing Functions

When using the Internet, you will receive a Public IPv4 address such as 19.34.37.226 or an IPv6 address like 2000:df31:17f4:b5b5:e6e:20b3:4435:b4d1. You can verify this by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, attempting to convey these addresses to non-technical individuals or even mentioning MAC addresses like 91:18:5f:f0:d7:c9 can quickly become complex and error-prone. Moreover, this does not provide any historical data, especially regarding past issues.

When navigating to a website such as https://trantow.org, your first step is to access a DNS server, which will translate the host portion (trantow) combined with the Top Level Domain (org) of the URL into an IP address, such as 131.88.196.11. Every web request from your computer and browser includes its type, for example:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36

Understanding the Significance of Default Gateways

The default gateway is typically an address that is automatically configured via DHCP. You will receive a default gateway such as 192.168.68.203 (although they normally end in .1 or .254 based on the scope size), and this is where your computer directs all its traffic to be routed onwards. For IPv6, a comprehensive guide on how-to-fix-ipv6-connectivity/ is available, but you can also check on Mac or Linux using the following command:

IPv4 Routes and the Host IPv4 Route Table (inc. VPN)

netstat -rn -f inet | egrep -i "default|0/1|128.0/1"

0/1      172.18.12.193  UGScg  utun3
default  192.168.68.203    UGScg  en0
128.0/1  172.18.12.193  UGSc   utun3

Note: We are not just looking for the default but also for any VPN that overrides the public v4 address space.

IPv6 Routes and the Host IPv6 Route Table (inc. VPN)

netstat -rn -f inet6 | egrep -i "default|2000::/3"

If you have IPv6 active the above should return at least one route (as per below) via a known interface such as “en0 " on a Mac.

default   fe80:4ffb:4417:5436:7470%en0  UGcg   en0
default   fe80::%utun0                   UGcIg  utun0
default   fe80::%utun1                   UGcIg  utun1
default   fe80::%utun2                   UGcIg  utun2
2000::/3  utun3                          USc    utun3

Note: We are not just looking for the default but also for any VPN that overrides the public v6 address space.

Debugging DHCP for both IPv4 and IPv6

To get a look at the low level DHCP configuration (Mac/Linux):

ipconfig getpacket en0

...
domain_name_server (ip_mult): {239.249.64.135, 88.146.253.171}
end (none):
...

So, in the above we are not getting IPv6 DNS servers from the DHCPv4 reply but…

ipconfig getv6packet en0

DHCPv6 REPLY (7) Transaction ID 0x80940b Length 76
Options[4] = {
  CLIENTID (1) Length 14: DUID LLT HW 1 Time 668691856 Addr 91:18:5f:f0:d7:c9
  DNS_SERVERS (23) Length 32: 2606:4700:4700::1111, 2001:4860:4860::8844
  DOMAIN_LIST (24) Length 0:  Invalid
  SERVERID (2) Length 10: DUID LL HW 1 Addr 40:29:79:61:99:65
}

Resolving Connectivity Issues for Wired and Wireless Networks

When it comes to transferring data to your router, you may be utilizing either a wired or wireless (Wi-Fi) medium at the physical and data layer.

Tips for Addressing Problems on Apple macOS / OSX Systems

Regardless of whether you are running OSX/macOS versions such as 10.15.7, 11.2.7, or 12.2.2, there are various troubleshooting tools available. However, the manual actions and scripts provided do not offer a set of correlated values over time. This is where automated remote troubleshooting becomes valuable, particularly for teams that embrace remote work and Work From Anywhere (WFA).

Pre-installed Scripts for Assistance

An extremely useful tool on OSX/macOS is sudo wdutil info, which provides a dump of the current wireless settings to the CLI, and can also be configured to generate specific troubleshooting logs. Furthermore, the sysdiagnose tool can be used to produce a wide range of logs, although much of it is only relevant to wireless at specific points in time, similar to wdutil.

Running sudo nohup /usr/bin/sysdiagnose -u & in the background will create logs in /var/tmp/<blah>.tar.gz for you. If you prefer to run it interactively (even though there is minimal interaction), you can run
sudo /usr/bin/sysdiagnose, which will display a privacy warning. When not run in the background, it should open Finder in the correct location, and you can navigate to /var/tmp or use Finder with Cmd+Shift+G to locate the path. However, be cautious of the large file sizes, which are typically around 300MB.

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