{"id":1049,"date":"2012-04-01T21:13:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-01T21:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2012-04-01T21:13:00","modified_gmt":"2012-04-01T21:13:00","slug":"apple-mac-osx-wi-fi-diagnostic-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/04\/01\/apple-mac-osx-wi-fi-diagnostic-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Mac OSX Wi-Fi Diagnostic Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like a colleague of mine<\/a>, for the last few weeks I\u2019ve had some random issues with my home Wi-Fi network dropping out.  It’ seems pretty random, though happens more in the evening \u2013 just when I\u2019m likely to be using it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an odd problem, especially as its cause is normally invisible interference, the only symptom is the Wi-Fi not working.  I figured that that there must be some tools out there that could help identify the cause, hopefully visualising it in some way so I can see what\u2019s happening.  <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve posted before about a Windows tool called inSSIDer<\/a> that does a good job identifying other wireless networks around you.  Keeping an eye on this few a few days ruled out a competing Wi-Fi network, and to be honest I doubt another wireless work could kill my network as completely as I\u2019ve been seeing \u2013 they\u2019re designed to be tolerant of that sort of thing.<\/p>\n

I also did quick search for Mac tools, there doesn\u2019t seem to be much out there, but a few sources did point to a native tools included in Lion, Apples own Wi-Fi Diagnostics.  It\u2019s not all that easy to find if you don\u2019t know it\u2019s there, but you\u2019ll find it in the \/System\/Library\/CoreServices\/Wi-Fi Diagnostics <\/strong>folder.<\/p>\n

\n

In Finder click the Go <\/strong>menu and \u2018Go To Folder\u2026<\/strong>\u2019
Enter in \/System\/Library\/CoreServices\/Wi-Fi Diagnostics <\/strong>and you\u2019ll find at the bottom<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Start it up and you\u2019ll be given four options:<\/p>\n

\"Apple<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first, monitor performance give you a simple chart of both signal and noise strength over time \u2013 this is really very handy, it showed me that when my network drops out the amount of noise sky rockets way above the signal strength.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Apple<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The second option shows a log of significant events that happen on your network, such as joining a different network or changing AP.  I didn\u2019t bother with a screen shot as not much really happens in here and it\u2019ll mostly be empty.<\/p>\n

The third option allows you to do a full packet capture of the traffic on your network, the traffic to and from your computer or traffic on nearby networks.  These can be saved in the standard .pcap format and opened up in wireshark<\/a>, but you can\u2019t view them in real-time using the tool itself.<\/p>\n

The last option shows a detailed log of what\u2019s happening on the network, I don\u2019t pretend to understand that much about what\u2019s happening but I\u2019d assume it\u2019s useful into on the right hands!<\/p>\n

\"Apple<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So there you go, if you have a Mac there\u2019s a handy little tool hidden away within it that could help troubleshoot Wi-Fi problems.  Now I just need to figure out what might cause three 30 second bursts of 2.4GHz interference over a three minute period and therefore stops me streaming movies to my Xbox!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion includes a handy Wi-Fi Diagnostic tool<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[496,31,497,484,96,142,401,498],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-10-7","tag-apple","tag-diagnostics","tag-lion","tag-mac","tag-osx","tag-wi-fi","tag-wireshark","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1061,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/1061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}