Edge-Echo/mcp-netassist

**Network and proxy diagnostics your agent can run itself — in any MCP client: Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop or DSH.**
When you need this
- Your MCP client cannot reach GitHub or npm and you want the agent to find out why
- You want the same diagnostics in every editor instead of one plugin per host
- You are tired of the agent guessing at network problems
The score badge says it plainly: this server is listed on Glama, claimed by its maintainer, with its tool definitions rated A. Requires Windows — see Platform below.
Works with any MCP client — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Reasonix, CodeWhale, DeepSeek Harness. Point your agent at it and ask "is GitHub reachable?", "why is my proxy not working?", "what should I change?" — instead of guessing.
Built for the China-network reality: flaky GitHub, proxies that are half-configured, hosts files that fight the proxy, and TUN mode that silently overrides the system proxy.
> Windows-only for now: the checks call PowerShell. The protocol layer is portable; a POSIX backend is the obvious next step.
Feedback
Installs are visible in the download counts; whether this helps is not. If you use it, one line
about the actual task is worth more than a star — **particularly if it did not work**, which is
the case that never gets reported:
- what you were trying to do
- whether it did it
- what was missing or wrong
Tell me in an issue — or if something is already broken,
just open a normal bug report.
Platform
**Windows.** The checks read the system proxy from the Windows registry and shell out to
powershell.exe; on Linux and macOS the tools start but their checks cannot run, and they
report PowerShell failed: spawn powershell.exe ENOENT rather than pretending to have
checked something.
The packaging is portable (any MCP client can connect, the server speaks plain stdio), but the
*diagnostics* are Windows-specific today. A POSIX implementation would read the proxy from the
environment and use ss/lsof for port probing; that is not written yet, so the README says
Windows instead of implying otherwise.
Timing
Every check spawns a powershell.exe, and a cold one costs roughly 20 seconds to start. So on
a freshly booted Windows machine:
- the individual tools answer within about half a minute
- **net_doctor can exceed a minute**, because it runs four checks in parallel plus a port
probe
Most MCP clients default to a 60-second request timeout, so net_doctor may time out on a cold
machine even though it is working. If that happens, call the individual checks (net_github_status,
net_proxy_status, net_hosts_check) instead, or raise your client's request timeout. Once
PowerShell has been used a few times the cost drops sharply.
Tools
| Tool | Answers |
|---|---|
| net_github_status | Is github.com reachable right now? DNS, TCP 443, HTTPS status + latency |
| net_proxy_status | What proxy is the system using? Registry settings + env vars, including a disabled-but-leftover value |