Troubleshooting your CIS network connection

Use the following methods to gather information that can help you to troubleshoot your network connection.

Determine if your data is passing through your IBM Cloud Internet Services connection

IBM Cloud® Internet Services (CIS) uses HTTP headers, which it can read, add, or modify. The header lets us trace how a request was routed, using a CF-Ray number. The CF-Ray number can be found by a curl command or with a Google Chrome plugin in called "Claire".

To know whether data has passed through CIS, locate the Ray ID which is present on every packet.

Unix command line tools

curl for HTTP: $ curl -vso /dev/null http://example.com
dig for DNS: $ dig www.example.com
traceroute for network: $ traceroute example.com

For example, the terminal command curl -svo /dev/null YOUR_URL_HERE. -L results in the following:

CF-RAY: 1ca349b6c1300da3-SJC

Perform a traceroute?

To see whether a route goes through your CIS pathway, you can perform a dig in a Terminal window for Mac or Linux or use nslookup in the Windows command prompt for Windows.

If the packet has a CF-Ray value, then it has traveled through CIS.

The traceroute command shows the entire path that an IP request has taken.

The Support team makes use of these commands to assist you.

Adding CF-Ray headers

The CF-RAY header is added to help trace a request to a website through the network. Use it when working with Support to help troubleshoot any related issues with connectivity. You can reveal this "Ray ID" in your logs by making some edits to configuration files in Apache and nginx.

Apache

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\" %{CF-Ray}i" cf_custom

CustomLog log/access_log cf_custom

NGINX

log_format cf_custom '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local]  '
                    '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent '
                    '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" '
                    '$http_cf_ray';

access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log cf_custom;