When using the Internet, your device might be assigned a Public IPv4 address such as 151.185.59.19
or an IPv6 address like 2000:ef5f:4e90:bdcf:21f7:4734:b48:a748
. You can verify this information by visiting https://test-ipv6.com/. However, conveying these addresses to individuals who are not familiar with technology, or even the mention of MAC addresses like 8c:73:84:dc:f7:36
, can lead to errors and complexity. Moreover, it does not provide any historical data, particularly when issues have occurred in the past.
When attempting to access a webpage, such as https://anderson.name, the first step is to connect to a DNS server, which translates the host portion (anderson) in combination with the Top Level Domain (name) of the URL to an IP address like 240.38.62.44
. Furthermore, your computer and browser include detail about their type in all web requests, for instance, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36
The default gateway is typically an address that is automatically configured through DHCP. You would receive a default gateway like 172.25.179.73
(usually ending in .1 or .254 based on the scope size), and this is where your computer sends all its traffic to be directed further. For IPv6
, a comprehensive guide on how-to-fix-ipv6-connectivity/ is available, and the verification can be done 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 172.25.179.73 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 fe80:5a23:de30:8e69:9d3d%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): {29.189.34.5, 106.253.99.227} 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 8c:73:84:dc:f7:36 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 2a:2a:8c:e1:9e:c0 }
When it comes to sending data to your router, you may be utilizing a wired or wireless (Wi-Fi) medium at the physical and data layer. Troubleshooting these connection issues is essential for ensuring smooth network operation.
Regardless of the version of OSX or macOS you are currently using, whether it’s 10.15.4, 11.5.4, or 12.1.3, there are various tools available for resolving network connectivity issues. However, these manual actions and scripts do not provide a comprehensive view of correlated values over time. This is where automated remote troubleshooting becomes invaluable, especially for teams that have embraced remote work and Work From Anywhere (WFA) practices.
On OSX/macOS, the sudo wdutil info
tool is incredibly useful as it provides a detailed dump of current wireless settings to the command line interface (CLI). It can also be configured to generate specific logs for troubleshooting purposes. Additionally, the sysdiagnose
tool offers a more comprehensive range of logs; however, much of the information is only relevant to a specific point in time, similar to wdutil.
To run sysdiagnose
in the background and generate logs in /var/tmp/<blah>.tar.gz
, use the command sudo nohup /usr/bin/sysdiagnose -u &
. For an interactive run, use sudo /usr/bin/sysdiagnose
which will display a privacy warning. When not run in the background, this command should open Finder in the correct location, and you can also navigate to /var/tmp
or use Finder with Cmd+Shift+G to locate the files. Keep in mind that the file sizes are around 300MB on average.
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