How to: ‘Traceroute’ in OS X

February 22, 2012May 16, 2014 Mike Hudson Leave a comment

Traceroute is an important part of any IT experts toolkit who’s worth his salt.. Traceroute enables you to track down potential routing issues between your Mac/PC/Device to your Router/DNS Servers/Web Host.

If, like me you migrated over to Mac from a PC, you will be used to launching a command prompt and firing off the tracert command. However, in OS X the command is slightly different. Some may say it makes more sense..?

To use OS X Traceroute you need to launch a new terminal session, to do this open Applications > Utilities and click terminal.

When the terminal has launched simply type Traceroute followed by the address you want to trace the route to. So for example, if you wanted to check how your devices browser gets to Google.co.uk you would type:

Traceroute www.google.co.uk

1	Traceroute www.google.co.uk

Your mac will then resolve Google.co.uk to it’s IP address, and then trace each ‘hop’ from your device to the address. This can be very handy when trying to figure out if the routing issue is your equipment, your ISP’s equipment or the web host it’s self.

Set and unset IP Address from Terminal

February 18, 2012May 16, 2014 Mike Hudson 1 Comment

At work on my desk I have an iMac which I often use for configuring and shipping ADSL Routers, however once I am done it then goes back on the corporate network with a static address. Thus meaning I am often switching back and forth between DHCP and static on the network adapters config.

Which is where the next two terminal commands come in.

The following Terminal command set’s the IPv4 settings to manual then set’s the IP address of the adapter to 10.0.1.2, the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 and the router to 10.0.1.1

 networksetup -setmanual "Ethernet" 10.0.1.3 255.255.255.0 10.0.1.1

1	networksetup -setmanual "Ethernet" 10.0.1.3 255.255.255.0 10.0.1.1

The following Terminal command set’s the IPv4 settings to DHCP and clears the manual settings from the ethernet adapter.

 networksetup -setdhcp "Ethernet"

1	networksetup -setdhcp "Ethernet"

The code above changes the settings on the Ethernet adapter, you will need to change the string entry to the network adapter you want to update.

Get local IP Address in SuSe

March 28, 2009May 22, 2014 Mike Hudson Leave a comment

If (like me) you have migrated from Windows to Linux, you may have noticed you no longer have the IPConfig command available to get network card details.

Linux sports an alternative to ipconfig, which is called ifconfig.

You have to run ifconfig as an admin user, so in a terminal window type:

su
– You will be prompted to enter the admin accounts password
ifconfig
– You should now be presented with a list of all the network card configuration details for your PC.

Outlook VBA: Extract IP address from email header

December 24, 2008May 18, 2014 Mike Hudson Leave a comment

Whilst working in VBA in Microsoft Outlook, I decided to make a function to extract IP addresses from the headers of an email. This is mainly used for reporting spam, but I am sure it could be put to many other good uses!

If you use it, please leave me a comment with details on how you are using it.

Function GetIPAddresses(ByVal MsgHeader As String) As String()
Dim tempArr() As String, i As Long, RegEx As Object, RegC As Object
Set RegEx = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
ReDim tempArr(0)
With RegEx
.Global = True
.MultiLine = True
.Pattern = "[?(d{1,3}.d{1,3}.d{1,3}.d{1,3})]?"
End With
If RegEx.Test(MsgHeader) Then
Set RegC = RegEx.Execute(MsgHeader)
ReDim tempArr(RegC.Count - 1)
For i = 0 To RegC.Count - 1
tempArr(i) = RegC.Item(i).SubMatches(0)
Next
End If
Set RegEx = Nothing
Set RegC = Nothing
GetIPAddresses = tempArr
End Function Sample usage:
Dim IPAddrs() As String
IPAddrs = GetIPAddresses(theHeader)
If Len(IPAddrs(0)) &gt; 0 Then
MsgBox Join(IPAddrs, vbCrLf)
End If

Function GetIPAddresses(ByVal MsgHeader As String) As String()

Dim tempArr() As String, i As Long, RegEx As Object, RegC As Object

Set RegEx = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")

ReDim tempArr(0)

With RegEx

.Global = True

.MultiLine = True

.Pattern = "[?(d{1,3}.d{1,3}.d{1,3}.d{1,3})]?"

End With

If RegEx.Test(MsgHeader) Then

Set RegC = RegEx.Execute(MsgHeader)

ReDim tempArr(RegC.Count - 1)

For i = 0 To RegC.Count - 1

tempArr(i) = RegC.Item(i).SubMatches(0)

End If

Set RegEx = Nothing

Set RegC = Nothing

GetIPAddresses = tempArr

End Function Sample usage:

Dim IPAddrs() As String

IPAddrs = GetIPAddresses(theHeader)

If Len(IPAddrs(0)) > 0 Then

MsgBox Join(IPAddrs, vbCrLf)

End If

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How to: ‘Traceroute’ in OS X

Set and unset IP Address from Terminal

Get local IP Address in SuSe

Outlook VBA: Extract IP address from email header