To check if there are issues on your local network, you can ping your router’s address, which you can find in the Network preference pane. This tool sends packets of data over the network to a specified address, which can help you figure out if the remote server in question is encountering problems.
Most often you’ll refer to the info here when troubleshooting issues. When you select one, you’ll see the Hardware Address, associated IP, speed, and information about how much data is going in and out of that particular connection. The first tab, Info, provides information about your own computer, offering a drop-down menu of all your network interfaces-for example, if you have both wired ethernet and Wi-Fi connections. When you first launch Network Utility, you’ll see a single window with a variety of tabs, each of which offers different information.
If you want to go under the hood, Apple includes a suite of tools on your Mac to help you troubleshoot networking issues they’re all included in the Network Utility app, which you can find in System/Library/CoreServices/Applications-though it’s probably easier to simply type “Network Utility” into Spotlight. We take networking for granted these days, but it’s still a complicated beast.
