{"id":29485,"date":"2022-02-17T14:20:57","date_gmt":"2022-02-17T14:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.n-able.com\/?p=29485"},"modified":"2022-10-20T18:07:36","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T17:07:36","slug":"beyond-the-ping-managing-internet-issues-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.n-able.com\/de\/blog\/beyond-the-ping-managing-internet-issues-mac","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the ping"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI can\u2019t get this website to load.\u201d<\/p>\n

As common help requests go, this sort of ticket can cause any tech to roll their eyes in anticipation of wasting time on a wild goose chase. If example.com<\/span> isn\u2019t working for one of your users, it could be caused by any of a dozen or more points of failure\u2014everything from the user making a simple typo to a major Internet outage.<\/p>\n

In between those two extremes, the problem could exist on the user\u2019s computer, or at the web server itself, or any link in the long chain that connects the two. It could also be a temporary glitch that fixes itself before you can track it down.<\/p>\n

NB: The command line tools I mention in this post are generally preinstalled on Mac and Linux, and are mostly available on Windows as optional downloads. These same tasks can be run from various web-based tools, but if the problem involves connecting to websites, that\u2019s not really an option is it?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cGive me a ping, Vasily. One ping only, please.\u201d<\/h2>\n

The first tool most troubleshooters will turn to when diagnosing a network problem is the old reliable ping<\/b><\/span>. The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) utilized by the ping<\/b><\/span> command is so foundational to the functioning of the Internet, it\u2019s designated as Internet Protocol number one. (Transmission Control Protocol<\/a>, the TCP part of TCP\/IP, is number six<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

While a successful ping<\/b><\/span> can tell you that the server you\u2019re trying to reach is in fact reachable and currently online, it\u2019s not much help beyond that. There are also too many false negative scenarios to rule anything out from a failure.<\/p>\n

The next step up from ping<\/b><\/span> is traceroute<\/b><\/span> (abbreviated tracert<\/b><\/span> on Windows) or the more capable mtr<\/b><\/span> (originally \u201cMatt\u2019s Trace Route\u201d). Either tool will send a series of pings not only to the destination but to each router that sits between you and that server. The resulting report should tell you if the problem exists at one end of the connection or at a specific link along the chain.<\/p>\n

As helpful as this is, it still relies on ping<\/b><\/span> to do its job. The problem server may be online and functioning normally but ignoring ICMP traffic or your firewall rules could be blocking the response.<\/p>\n

And most of the time the problem is DNS anyway.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in a name?<\/h2>\n

You can get to example.com<\/span> from your computer, but it still won\u2019t load for the user. Maybe the trouble isn\u2019t even with example.com<\/span> but with the user\u2019s DNS resolution. (I could go into a long sidebar about how the domain name system works, but this article explains it better than I could: https:\/\/computer.howstuffworks.com\/dns.htm<\/span><\/a>)<\/p>\n

ping<\/b><\/span> relies on DNS to come up with where to send its packets, so you\u2019ll need to try some different tools to check if DNS is working.<\/p>\n

nslookup<\/b><\/span>\u2014the Name Server Lookup utility\u2014exists on Mac, Linux, and Windows. There\u2019s also dig<\/b><\/span>, but it\u2019s not typically installed on Windows by default. Either one will query the default DNS server and return where that server thinks example.com<\/span> resides. Like so:<\/p>\n

nslookup <\/b>example.com<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Often the trouble with your ISP\u2019s default DNS server is that everyone connected to your ISP is using it. ISP servers get overloaded and slow, and while your Internet speeds are still snappy, every site you go to feels sluggish because of the delay in resolving the domain for each connection. Luckily, plenty of alternatives exist, including public DNS servers run by companies with a stake in the Internet\u2019s infrastructure like Cloudflare, Cisco, and Google. Obviously, if you can\u2019t reach Google you have bigger problems than not being able to load one random website.<\/p>\n

So, this command will look up example.com<\/span> using Google\u2019s public DNS instead:<\/p>\n

nslookup <\/b>example.com<\/b><\/span> 8.8.8.8<\/b><\/p>\n

If you get a different response from 8.8.8.8 than you do from your default settings, then the problem is with your DNS server.<\/p>\n

Netcat, not to be confused with LOLcats<\/h2>\n

netcat<\/b><\/span> (or its modern replacement ncat<\/b><\/span>) is a network testing Swiss army knife. Like ping<\/b><\/span>, it can make connections to a remote server to see if it\u2019s online. But unlike ping<\/b><\/span>, netcat<\/b><\/span> can connect to any port and listen for a response on any protocol.<\/p>\n

For instance, to properly test a web server, you need to try and connect to it on the ports a web browser would use, primarily 80 and 443\u2014for HTTP and HTTPS respectively. To do that, you would do this:<\/p>\n

nc -z example.com 80<\/b><\/p>\n

nc -z <\/b>example.co<\/b>m<\/b> 443<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

And to determine if that DNS server you\u2019re using is actually listening for DNS requests on UDP port 53:<\/p>\n

nc -uz <\/b>dns.example.com<\/b> 53<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Detangling curls<\/h2>\n

If the server is showing signs of life with ping<\/b><\/span> and netcat<\/b><\/span> but still not giving you anything useful when you try it with a web browser, get a more useful web browser.<\/p>\n

The command line URL downloader, curl<\/b><\/span>, negotiates the same connections a graphical browser can but curl<\/b><\/span> will tell you what it\u2019s doing at every stage. Give this command a shot:<\/p>\n

curl -Lv <\/b>https:\/\/example.com<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The -L<\/b><\/span> option tells curl<\/b><\/span> to follow redirects and other server responses that normally tell a browser that the page it\u2019s looking for has moved. Verbose mode, invoked with -v<\/b><\/span>, can sometimes be just the trick you need to discover why that website isn\u2019t loading in Chrome. Unfortunately, the problem might still be on the server\u2019s side and there\u2019s nothing you can do about it.<\/p>\n

Then it\u2019s time to file the ticket \u201cunresolved\u201d and move on to something you can actually fix.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When it comes to internet connectivity issues, things are never quite as simple as they seem. This blog looks at some of the things available to help Mac managers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-29485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","topic-apple","topic-head-nerds"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBeyond the ping - N-able<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"With internet connectivity issues things are rarely as simple as they seem. 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