School server network debugging

When debugging a School server connectivity issue, there are a number of tools to use. These require an ssh connection (or console access) to the school server.

Are the Interfaces Present

You can check on the interfaces using the ifconfig command:

ifconfig
ifconfig eth0

A typical ifconfig output (for a machine with a single Active Antenna and one wired network interface) is:

insert dump here

The details of the wireless interfaces can be seen using iwconfig :

iwconfig
iwconfig msh0

route

Are Basic Services Running

You can check on the status of the basic services (DHCP, DNS) using:

sudo service dhcpd status
sudo service named status

If there are laptop running on the mesh, there will be DHCP traffic associated with each one every five minutes. This may be watched using:

sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

host and dig

Watching the Packets Go By

You can take a look at the packets traveling over an interface (in this case school-mesh-0) using the tcpdump command:

/sbin/tcpdump -i msh0

Turning On Additional Wireless Mesh Debugging

You can find out specific about the wireless mesh software drivers being used by using ethtool:

/sbin/ethtool -i msh0

You can enable additional debugging output from the driver using:

echo 0x136184 > /sys/module/libertas/parameters/libertas_debu