Remote Work WiFi Troubleshooting

[Kedgar]

Hello,
I'm wondering with more and more people having to work from home these days, how your support departments are handling requirements and troubleshooting of company equipment on home wireless networks? Specifically, say a user is complaining of slowness, dropped connections, etc... how do you rule out the users' own networks?

There are the obvious checks such as trace route, ping, etc. I was attempting to have a user run the wireless diagnostics and provide me the resulting tar, but it turns out that she needs admin rights in order to run that test. I'm maybe looking for something I can run from the cli that can give me stats like signal and interference info periodically... I might have to automate something with the "airport" command... looks like airport -i gives me that info... I can probably figure a way to parse that, repeat it, dump it all out to a log file.

Any other ideas?

[AJPinto]

By and large my company just troubleshoots the corporate asset and our VPN client, and requires you to come in to a corporate location if further troubleshooting is needed to confirm if the issue is the device. We have Mifi's that can be mailed if a corp network is not an option. Troubleshooting the personal network is the responsibility of the user and their ISP. This has been a fairly standard process at just about every place I have worked in the past 20 years.

[Kedgar]

@AJPinto Thanks... what I was able to do since there is a vpn connection, was to connect via ssh to the user's computer. I then added a cron job to give me the wireless connection stats, which she always has a fantastic signal... so that portion was ruled out. She let me know when she started having the issue again, and I could see that the latency of her network connection was through the roof... both pinging out to google, and pinging in through the vpn connection. This leads me to beleive that this is the ISP's fault. One more test I will do is wait for the issue to occur again, and I will ping her router and see if there are any dropped packets or bad latency. I think this is 100% her ISP though.

[AJPinto]

If you guys don't have some kind of always on enforcement for your VPN you can have her drop the VPN connection and test and see if the issues persist. If the issue comes and goes it really sounds like an ISP issue to me.

May want to ask if weather comes in to play, for example if the lines in her area are cracked when it rains the internet speeds will degrade massively as water gets in the lines.

Even high area network usage can impact a network connection, for example when all the kiddos get home from school and kick up Netflix. if there is a problem with the area circuit there will be degradation in performance.

[pansift]

This is the exact problem that I'm trying to address and even built a new tool to address it. You can do instant remote troubleshooting (inc. retrospectively) that focuses on wired/wireless LAN network, ISP, DNS, HTTP etc. There's a free account with 2 free agents to play around with on family or work laptops and it's macOS specific for now https://pansift.com . It might be exactly what you're looking for! 

[pansift]

P.S. If anyone has any feedback on the one-click demo and has additional features they'd like to see I'd love to chat about how we could add them (and also make deployment with jamf a super smooth option...).