How Do You Support OSX Connectivity

Explanation of Internet Addressing System When connecting to the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address, such as 14.51.96.81, or an IPv6 address, like 2000:445:4ef6:5aee:2695:13b6:24be:cd7a. You can verify this by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, conveying these addresses, as well as MAC addresses, such as 4f:3e:59:55:d7:f9, can be prone to errors, especially for non-technical individuals. Explanation of Internet Addressing System When connecting to the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address, such as 14.51.96.81, or an IPv6 address, like 2000:445:4ef6:5aee:2695:13b6:24be:cd7a. You can verify this by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, conveying these addresses, as well as MAC addresses, such as 4f:3e:59:55:d7:f9, can be prone to errors, especially for non-technical individuals.

Explanation of Internet Addressing System

When connecting to the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address, such as 14.51.96.81, or an IPv6 address, like 2000:445:4ef6:5aee:2695:13b6:24be:cd7a. You can verify this by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, conveying these addresses, as well as MAC addresses, such as 4f:3e:59:55:d7:f9, can be prone to errors, especially for non-technical individuals. Additionally, it does not provide any historical data.

Procedure for Accessing Websites

To access a website, such as https://kassulke.info, you first contact a DNS server to translate the host (kassulke) and the Top Level Domain (info) of the URL to an IP address, like 81.245.131.96. Every time your computer and browser send their types with web requests, such as
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/7046A194A.

Significance of Default Gateways

Your default gateway is typically an automatically configured address via DHCP. You receive a default gateway, such as 10.185.182.177 (usually ending in .1 or .254 depending on the scope size), to which your computer forwards all its traffic. For IPv6, we offer an in-depth guide on how-to-fix-ipv6-connectivity/, but you can verify it 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  10.185.182.177    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:ca7c:f312:2f48:dac8%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): {21.65.86.36, 246.69.141.13}
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 4f:3e:59:55:d7:f9
  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 1c:a4:7a:9b:32:92
}

Resolve Wired and Wireless Connectivity Issues

Whether you are utilizing a wired or wireless (Wi-Fi) connection to transmit data to your router, issues at the physical and data layer can arise.

Troubleshooting Tips for Apple macOS / OSX

Regardless of the version of OSX/macOS you are running, be it 10.14.7, 11.4.7, or 12.3.5, there is a variety of troubleshooting tools available. However, these manual actions and scripts do not provide a consistent 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).

In-Built Scripts for Assistance

One useful tool in OSX/macOS is sudo wdutil info, which offers a dump of current wireless settings to the CLI and can be configured to generate specific logs for troubleshooting. Additionally, the sysdiagnose tool can generate a wide range of logs, although much of it is only relevant to wireless settings at a specific point in time, similar to wdutil.

By running sudo nohup /usr/bin/sysdiagnose -u & in the background, logs will be written to /var/tmp/<blah>.tar.gz. For an interactive mode (although there is minimal interaction), you can run sudo /usr/bin/sysdiagnose, which will prompt a privacy warning. When not run in the background, it should open Finder in the correct location, or you can navigate to /var/tmp using Finder with Cmd+Shift+G. However, be cautious of file sizes, which can be around 300MB.

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