Dropping network connections can be incredibly frustrating. And finding the source can be a challenge. Over the years, I’ve found a number of troubleshooting methods, but the intermittent drop can be the worse to troubleshoot around. When this happens, I’ve occasionally resorted to scripting around failures, and dumping information into a log file to find the issue. For example, you may find that when a network connection fails, you have a very strong signal somewhere, or that you have a very weak signal on all networks.
I’ve found there are three pretty simple commands to test joining/unjoining, and using networks (beyond the standard pings or port scans on hosts). The first is the airport command, along with –disassociate. This just unjoins all networks:
sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport --disassociate
The second is a quick scan. Here, I’ve grep’d out the network I’m after (aka SSIDofNetwork – a very likely wireless network name), but when looking for environmental issues, you might choose to parse this into a csv and output all networks:
sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -s | grep SSIDofNetwork
Finally, you can join a network. You might have to escape out special characters in a password and it’s never wise to put a password into a script, etc. But, quick and dirty, this will join that SSIDofNetwork network:
sudo networksetup -setairportnetwork en0 "SSIDofNetwork" mysecretpassword
Anyway, loop it, invoke it however you invoke it, etc. Hope this helps someone, and if you have other tricks you’ve found helpful, feel free to throw them in the ‘ole comments!
