The Mac Admin's Blog

If you dont know what would be the use of this article and what can be done by tracing packets, then probably this article is not for you. :) So lets begin! Find out what is the BS Device ID of your WiFi by going to System Profiler. Let me grab a screenshot here: Now lets use the command  tcpdump  to get what we are looking for. Also, there is another command  airport  to do similar job but we will cover details of that tool in upcoming post. sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 -B 524288 -w ~/Desktop/TracePacket1.pcap It should display the details as - tcpdump: Listening... Once this is complete, close down the process. You have a TracePackage.pcap ready with the packets. Now we need to read what has it got. So we will leverage tcpdump again: tcpdump -s 0 -n -e -x -vvv -r ~/Desktop/TracePacket1.pcap Using this you can do network troubleshooting, debug a network problem. If you find yourself dumb enough to do this, you have some helpers out there, watch out for these tools, they will do the same

Disk Utility, Network preference pane, Console, Activity Monitor & System Profiler These are five pillars of troubleshooting a Mac machines. If you are facing any issue try to check if you could locate it and then try to resolve using these tools. A breif intoduction of each of the item is here and I will surely write details of each of them later in coming posts. 1. Disk Utility: Disk Utility , located in the Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities folder, can perform two types of repairs via the following choices in the First Aid tab: a. Repair Disk b. Repair Disk permissions. While Repair Disk can correct a variety of directory problems, it is generally incapable of repairing severe directory corruption for which you can try few third party applications, but before you try them, assure that you have the latest version of the utility that is compatible with the version of Mac OS X you are using. Repair Disk Permissions verifies and, if problems are found, resets (repairs)