How To Test Wifi Issues

The Functioning of Internet Addressing When connected to the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address (e.g. 114.33.184.240) or an IPv6 address (e.g. 2000:5182:39c4:6aa0:d2a6:65ba:bd31:8388). You can verify this information by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, translating these addresses or MAC addresses (e. The Functioning of Internet Addressing When connected to the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address (e.g. 114.33.184.240) or an IPv6 address (e.g. 2000:5182:39c4:6aa0:d2a6:65ba:bd31:8388). You can verify this information by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, translating these addresses or MAC addresses (e.

The Functioning of Internet Addressing

When connected to the Internet, you are assigned a Public IPv4 address (e.g. 114.33.184.240) or an IPv6 address (e.g. 2000:5182:39c4:6aa0:d2a6:65ba:bd31:8388). You can verify this information by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, translating these addresses or MAC addresses (e.g. 77:57:84:ac:65:04) can be quite complicated and error-prone, especially for those who are not tech-savvy. Furthermore, this approach lacks historical data, particularly during past issues.

Accessing a website like https://ferry.net involves contacting a DNS server to convert the host name (ferry) and the Top Level Domain (net) of the URL into an IP address (e.g. 65.218.10.20). Whenever your computer and browser make web requests, they transmit information on their type, such as
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 through DHCP. This gateway, which usually ends in .1 or .254 depending on the scope size, is where your computer directs all its traffic for further routing. For IPv6, you can refer to our in-depth article on how-to-fix-ipv6-connectivity/ or check 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  192.168.207.216    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   fe80:6cdc:f262:4692:1b89%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): {59.233.17.243, 208.91.43.231}
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 77:57:84:ac:65:04
  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 ba:63:ea:f6:22:58
}

Resolving Connectivity Issues for Wired or Wireless Networks

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

Troubleshooting Methods for Apple macOS / OSX

Regardless of whether you are using OSX/macOS version 10.11.5, 11.6.2, or 12.3.2, there are various tools available for troubleshooting. However, the manual actions and scripts do not provide a set of correlated values over time. This is where automated remote troubleshooting becomes valuable, especially for teams that adopt remote work and Work From Anywhere (WFA) practices.

Useful Built-in Utilities

A particularly valuable tool on OSX/macOS is the sudo wdutil info command, which provides a dump of the current wireless settings to the command line interface, and can be configured to generate specific logs for troubleshooting purposes. Alternatively, the sysdiagnose tool offers a more comprehensive option for generating a wide range of logs, although many are only relevant at a specific point in time, similar to wdutil.

To run the sysdiagnose tool in the background and generate logs in /var/tmp/<blah>.tar.gz, you can use the command sudo nohup /usr/bin/sysdiagnose -u &. If you prefer to run it interactively, you can use the command sudo /usr/bin/sysdiagnose, but keep in mind that it will open Finder in the correct location or you can navigate to /var/tmp manually or by using Finder with Cmd+Shift+G. Be mindful of the file sizes, which are around 300MB.

Possibly Helpful Videos

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Table 1.0 - Video Help



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