Wireless Diagnostics on Mac OS X Primer Tutorial
Many of us around the world use Wireless networks to reach the Internet. And for many of us, the nuts and bolts of how that is done is not of the greatest interest to us on a day to day basis, until the day that the Wi-Fi connections get annoyingly flaky, or non-existant, that is. Our setup here has a cable network to the front of the house where there is a Netgear cable modem CG3100D, then a Netgear AC1200 WiFi Range Extender helps us out providing a Wireless network throughout the inside, and little bits of the outside, of the house.
This network has been known to be flaky at times and a turning off and on of the WiFi via this MacBook Pro’s (Mac OS X’s) top WiFi icon’s “Turn Wi-Fi Off” then “Turn Wi-Fi On” option, recently, has helped. Perhaps there is interference from other Wireless networks? But rather than me surmising … read on …
We decided to add more curiosity into the mix of this networking issue, and research it, from which we got the heads up about how Mac OS X has a method to start down the road of diagnosing the problems here, that being …
Hold the "option" key while clicking the WiFi icon
And then we went ahead and went through the motions of completing the reporting and monitoring of our Wireless network, to result in a report, stopping when our monitoring detected a Wireless network failure. We show all this with today’s PDF slideshow of us doing this. Along the way we posit one possibility, that we can thank the act of performing this report got us up and about gathering information (regarding network router and extender model numbers) for, that being that the power supply to our Wi-Fi Extender could be compromised on the power board we were using. That may not ultimately be the entire reason (and you can try its suggestions for more ideas here), but it is salutary that getting up and checking can help with these matters seemed to help out for a while after that, on reseating the WiFi Extender’s power arrangements.
What form does the Wireless Diagnostics report take? A *.tar.gz file in /var/tmp which can be extracted from further on in the formal run through of Mac OS X program screens, and also at the command line via (for our WirelessDiagnostics_D92G62KXDRJ7_2018-12-07_20.17.07.tar.gz example) …
cd /var/tmp
tar -zxvf WirelessDiagnostics_D92G62KXDRJ7_2018-12-07_20.17.07.tar.gz
… and then opening (for us wireless_diagnostics-bl1Mgp.log) with the Console application to get more nitty gritty here. Interpreting the report is not formalised with native Mac OS X software, but see if you can see an RSSI value, and look for more information from the net, or friends or YouTube or the net here.
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