Traceroute is a command line utility for troubleshooting network connectivity issues.

Here’s how to run a traceroute on a Mac to find out what’s slowing down your internet. However, you can do a little sleuthing on your computer and find out the reason for yourself. When that happens, your first instinct might be to call your internet service provider and ask them what’s causing the problem.

This will report back something like the following, with the first “Server” and “Address” bit showing the DNS IP used by the local machine:įinally, another option is to look at /etc/nf, but because that file is automatically generated, it is not always considered accurate if DNS has recently changed and has not yet been flushed, do note that flushing DNS is a bit different in new versions of OS X, as Apple has changed how DNS functions on several occasions.Sometimes, you might have a hard time accessing certain websites, or you can’t connect to them at all. If you need to, you can use a free utility like namebench to find a fast DNS server.Īdditionally, you can retrieve DNS information by using the ‘nslookup’ command on a server, this will report back the remote servers DNS details, as well as your own primary DNS to resolve the other server: Just replace the latter interface text with the interface you are looking to identify DNS IP information for, typically it’s the same for every interface on the computer.Īssuming there are several DNS servers set within Mac OS X’s networking preferences, you will see a report of each DNS server in the order of their priority, looking something like this:įor those wondering, the top most DNS IP in that sample list is Google’s Public DNS, the next two are from OpenDNS, with the last being a local router. Note that I’m specifying “Wi-Fi” or ‘airport’ in these example strings because I primarily use a wireless connection, but you could also specify ethernet and bluetooth to get the DNS details for those interfaces. Getting DNS info from the command line in prior versions of OS X, like Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.5, and before, use the following syntax instead: Replace Wi-Fi with ethernet or your interface of choice if otherwise. This presumes you’re using wi-fi, which most of us do these days.

Get ip address mac terminal command