How Do You Support Mac Internet

The Functioning of Internet Addressing When accessing the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address, such as 217.131.16.191, or an IPv6 address, like 2000:14b0:43a9:afa9:a31f:7062:be1d:4b1e. Verification can be done by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. Communicating these addresses or MAC addresses like 78:96:12:1a:31:22 can be error-prone and complex for those unfamiliar with technology. The Functioning of Internet Addressing When accessing the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address, such as 217.131.16.191, or an IPv6 address, like 2000:14b0:43a9:afa9:a31f:7062:be1d:4b1e. Verification can be done by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. Communicating these addresses or MAC addresses like 78:96:12:1a:31:22 can be error-prone and complex for those unfamiliar with technology.

The Functioning of Internet Addressing

When accessing the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address, such as 217.131.16.191, or an IPv6 address, like 2000:14b0:43a9:afa9:a31f:7062:be1d:4b1e. Verification can be done by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. Communicating these addresses or MAC addresses like 78:96:12:1a:31:22 can be error-prone and complex for those unfamiliar with technology. Additionally, it lacks historical data, particularly related to past issues.

How to Reach Websites

When attempting to access a website, such as https://jakubowski.name, the process involves initially accessing a DNS server to convert the host component (jakubowski) and the Top Level Domain (name) of the URL into an IP address, like 17.118.117.130. For every web request, your computer and browser sends its type, for example:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; AS; rv:11.0) like Gecko

The Significance of Default Gateways

The default gateway, usually configured automatically via DHCP, assigns an address like 192.168.108.123 (typically ending in .1 or .254 based on the scope size). This is where all of your computer’s traffic is routed. For IPv6, detailed guidance is available at how-to-fix-ipv6-connectivity/, and you can verify on Mac or Linux using:

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  192.168.108.123    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   fe80:51b5:23cb:f02c:b97b%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): {246.65.150.153, 103.116.199.225}
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 78:96:12:1a:31:22
  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 0e:d7:45:cd:29:ed
}

Fixing Connectivity Issues for Wired and Wireless Networks

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

Troubleshooting Tips for Apple macOS / OSX

No matter which version of OSX/macOS you are currently running - whether it’s 10.13.2, 11.0.2, or 12.2.6 - there are various tools available for troubleshooting. However, these manual actions and scripts do not provide a series of correlated values over time. This is where automated remote troubleshooting becomes valuable, particularly for teams that are embracing remote work and the Work From Anywhere (WFA) trend.

Helpful Built-in Scripts

One particularly useful tool on OSX/macOS is the sudo wdutil info, which provides a dump of current wireless settings to the CLI and can also be configured to generate specific logs for troubleshooting. Furthermore, the sysdiagnose tool can be used to generate a wide range of logs (although many are only point-in-time in relation to wireless, similar to wdutil).

To run sudo nohup /usr/bin/sysdiagnose -u & in the background and write logs to /var/tmp/<blah>.tar.gz, or to run it interactively, you can use sudo /usr/bin/sysdiagnose. Just be mindful of the large file sizes, which are approximately 300MB.

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