learn how to troubleshoot spurious community timeouts

We’ve a “Apple Studio M1” with macOS 13.6.1 (Ventura) in one among our studios.

Because the machine is little used however operating 24/7, I’ve set it up as a CI-runner for our native GitLab occasion (utilizing gitlab-runner+tart).

Principally issues work as anticipated.

Nevertheless, from time to time, the machine turns into unreachable over the community.
That’s:

• I can nonetheless ping the machine
• making an attempt to ssh into the machine stalls
• open ssh classes grow to be unresponsive

after some time (a few minutes), the system goes again to regular, and I can resume my work within the ssh session (or login through ssh once more).

the gitlab-ci jobs are run inside a digital machine (tart is utilizing the Virtualization.Framework).
if a gitlab-ci job has been operating in the course of the community outage, it seems to maintain operating wonderful.
solely, if it must entry the community itself (e.g. as a result of it installs one thing through brew, or tries to obtain stuff in any other case,…) the job will fail with one thing like this:

$ which automake || brew set up automake automake not discovered ==> Fetching dependencies for automake: m4 and autoconf ==> Fetching m4 ==> Downloading https://uncooked.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/c8215d5f7473269cd331dcd8cd3ab38e7c26dfe9/System/m/m4.rb curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host: uncooked.githubusercontent.com 

the host has at present some issues with its monitor (it is behind an oldish KVM swap) and apart from it’s in one other ground, so its impractical to verify the state of affairs immediately on the machine.
on the plus aspect, which means that I’m fairly positive that no one is fuddling with the settings 🙂

as i am a linux man by commerce, i would love some recommendation on learn how to debug this subject (e.g. which logs to verify, which instruments to run,…)

my naive checks of among the issues like system.log revealed nothing.

e.g. i logged into the machine about an hour in the past, and the connection stalled at about 11:45. it’s now (12:05) reachable once more, and the syslog says:

Jul 29 09:07:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 09:17:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 09:27:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 09:37:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 09:47:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 09:57:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 10:07:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 10:17:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 10:27:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 10:37:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 10:47:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 10:57:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 11:07:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 11:17:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 11:27:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 11:37:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 11:39:02 macstudio sshd: macuser [priv][97641]: USER_PROCESS: 97643 ttys000 Jul 29 11:47:30 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 11:56:34 macstudio sshd: macuser [priv][97675]: USER_PROCESS: 97677 ttys001 Jul 29 11:57:16 macstudio sshd: macuser [priv][97675]: USER_PROCESS: 97677 ttys005 Jul 29 11:58:19 macstudio syslogd[132]: ASL Sender Statistics Jul 29 12:02:19 macstudio sshd: macuser [priv][97675]: USER_PROCESS: 97677 ttys006 

(so to my eye there isn’t any hint).

the set up.log has an fascinating entry at in regards to the time the host got here again: “System has powered on”:

2025-07-29 08:32:31+02 macstudio SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager[587]: AssertionMgr: Cancel com.apple.softwareupdate.NotifyAgentAssertion-UpdatesAvailable assertion for pid 587, id 0x8B7B 2025-07-29 08:32:31+02 macstudio SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager[10548]: AssertionMgr: Cancel com.apple.softwareupdate.NotifyAgentAssertion-UpdatesAvailable assertion for pid 10548, id 0x8B7A 2025-07-29 12:02:25+02 macstudio SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager[587]: SUOSUPowerEventObserver: System will energy on 2025-07-29 12:02:25+02 macstudio SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager[587]: SUOSUPowerEventObserver: System has powered on 2025-07-29 12:02:25+02 macstudio softwareupdated[335]: SUOSUPowerEventObserver: System will energy on 2025-07-29 12:02:25+02 macstudio softwareupdated[335]: SUOSUPowerEventObserver: System has powered on 2025-07-29 12:07:50+02 macstudio SoftwareUpdateNotificationManager[587]: SUOSUPowerEventObserver: System is contemplating sleep 2025-07-29 12:07:50+02 macstudio softwareupdated[335]: SUOSUPowerEventObserver: System is contemplating sleep