Network Diagnostics on a Chromebook.

There a number of functions you can use to gain some fairly low level information on the behaviour of the network interfaces on a Chromebook.


In Developer Mode you can enter the BASH shell (Ctrl+Alt+T > shell) and type"packet_capture" to start capturing outgoing packets.

Ping is a useful troubleshooting tool, allowing you to see how long packets take to travel between servers and see if packets are being dropped. It works  like the ping command on other operating systems. Press Ctrl+C to stop the ping process or halt any other command in Crosh.

But those who don't want to have their device in Developer Mode (as is the case with most Enterprise or Education situations), there are two other methods.

If you're only wanting the traffic from the page you're loading, you can use the Developer Tools (Ctrl+Shift+j) and go to the "Network" tab. From there, you can record the page events, where the outbound requests are going and what (if anything is being blocked).

Checking the box to "Preserve log" helps when navigating to multiple pages or reloading. You can right click in the table under Name and save the collection (including loaded resource) as a HAR or HTML Archive file.

If you believe you have Chrome extension that's misbehaving you can navigate to:

chrome://net-internals 

This URL can capture all traffic that goes out any network port and gives the chance to save and examine the resulting file.

If you go to the "Capture" drop down and check the "Include the actual bytes sent/received." box, the file includes actual outgoing and incoming packets although the file can be very large.