When connecting to the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address such as 7.255.134.107
or an IPv6 address like 2000:93ae:d469:f442:cce2:1d2c:dffa:aa03
. This can be verified at https://test-ipv6.com/. However, conveying these addresses to individuals who may not be technologically savvy, or even referring to MAC addresses like c7:be:e8:40:61:85
, can be prone to errors and can become complex quickly. Additionally, this method lacks historical data, especially when previous issues arose.
When attempting to reach a webpage such as https://doyle.name, the first step is to access a DNS server to convert the host portion (doyle) combined with the Top Level Domain (name) of the URL to an IP address, such as 140.208.90.129
. Each web request sent by your computer and browser includes its type, for example Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; AS; rv:11.0) like Gecko
A default gateway is typically an automatically configured address through DHCP. This gateway, such as 192.0.0.11
(usually ending in .1 or .254 based on scope size), is where your computer directs all of its traffic to be routed onwards. For IPv6
, a detailed guide is available at how-to-fix-ipv6-connectivity/, and can be checked on Mac or Linux using:
netstat -rn -f inet | egrep -i "default|0/1|128.0/1"
0/1 172.18.12.193 UGScg utun3 default 192.0.0.11 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.
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:fb41:1e59:c0f:9f6d%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.
To get a look at the low level DHCP configuration (Mac/Linux):
ipconfig getpacket en0
... domain_name_server (ip_mult): {126.5.199.173, 5.80.236.82} 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 c7:be:e8:40:61:85 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 28:93:2f:0b:de:15 }
When it comes to transferring data to your router, you may be using either a wired or wireless (Wi-Fi) medium at the physical and data layer.
Regardless of whether you are running 10.11.4
, 11.5.1
, or 12.2.1
, there are various troubleshooting tools available for macOS users. However, these manual actions and scripts do not provide a series of correlated values over time. This is where automated remote troubleshooting becomes valuable, especially for teams that embrace remote work and Work from Anywhere (WFA).
One useful tool on OSX/macOS is the sudo wdutil info
command, which provides a dump of current wireless related settings to the CLI and can be configured to generate specific logs for troubleshooting. Additionally, the sysdiagnose
tool can be used to generate a wide range of logs, although much of it is only relevant to wireless settings, similar to wdutil.
Running sudo nohup /usr/bin/sysdiagnose -u &
in the background will generate logs in /var/tmp/<blah>.tar.gz
for you. If you prefer to run it interactively, you can usesudo /usr/bin/sysdiagnose
, although it will give a privacy warning. When not run in the background, it should open Finder in the correct location, or you can navigate to /var/tmp
or use Finder with Cmd+Shift+G to point Finder to the path. Keep in mind that the file sizes are approximately 300MB.
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