Mac Network Tools

Have you ever wondered how to get the Macintosh to help you diagnose network trouble? TCP/IP troubles? Appletalk problems?

You need diagnostic tools that give you the data about your environment.

Here are some of my favorite, cheap-o tools for analyzing networks. Each of these tools have a limited use demo version for your testing.

AGNetTools is a useful, menu-driven IP test utility suite for Mac:

http://www.aggroup.com/products/agnettools

IP Diagnostic Tools Included:

	DNS Lookup
	Finger
	Name Lookup
	Name Scan
	Ping
	Ping Scan
	Port Scan
	Service Scan
	Throughput
	Trace Route
	Who Is

OT Tool looks at your ARP cache IP settings, and Appletalk Settings.
ftp://ftp2.neon.com/pub/goodies

IPNetMonitor provides a set of twelve commonly used Internet tools which allow Macintosh users to monitor and debug their connections to the Internet. The tools are designed to help users quickly identify problems, locate where the problem is, and gather data which can be used to solve the problem, either directly or through their Internet Service Provider.

http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipmonitor.html

Ping	Tests IP connectivity to a designated IP address.
Trace Route	Shows the IP addresses and names of all the hosts and routers between you and a remote IP address. Also displays round trip time to these individual hosts/routers.
Name Server Lookup (NS Lookup)	Typically used to determine the true IP address of an alphanumeric domain name
Who Is	Typically used to determine ownership, technical responsibility of a given domain name.
Finger	Typically used to get information about a specific host or user on a host. With security and privacy concerns, this information is not always available.
Monitor	Used to monitor the throughput on a selected interface for the machine running IPNetMonitor.
TCP Info	The TCP info window allows you to examine TCP/IP data transfer and connection state more closely on the machine running IPNetMonitor.
Connection List	The Connection List window allows you to see information about your current TCP/IP connections on the machine running IPNetMonitor.
Address Scan	The Address Scan window allows you to scan a range of IP Addresses to check for available hosts and assigned domain names.
Subnet Calculator	The Subnet Calculator makes it easier to specify IP addresses and masks for routing.
DHCP Lease	The DHCP Lease window provides information about the local DHCP Lease when configure via DHCP is selected in the TCP/IP Control Panel. This feature is only available under MacOS 8.5 and later which includes Network Setup.
DHCP Test	The DHCP Test window allows you to exercise a DHCP Server.

OT Advanced Tuner
http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ottuner.html

OT Advanced Tuner is a simple control panel like application that allows you to optimize TCP/IP network performance under Macintosh Open Transport by tuning internal TCP/IP parameters to match your network environment. The Tuner supports over 30 adjustable parameters including the TCP Window Size, Time Out intervals, Maximum Segment Size, and MTU.

Why might you need it? Open Transport's default settings must enable connections for both slow analog modems as well as very high-speed ethernet connections. As such, these default settings are not optimized for either type of connection (although they do let both types of connections to work). To get the most out of a specific type of connection you really want to setup Open Transport so that its internal settings best match that of your network connection. This is where OT Advanced Tuner comes in....to assist you in tweaking these Open Transport settings.

We even assist you with this by supplying you some pre-configured OT Advanced Tuner documents for both slow and high-speed network connections. All you need to do is double click the appropriate document and Open Transport is automatically configured for your chosen network connection type. That easy.

Once the desired parameters are set, you can quit OT Advanced Tuner. OT Advanced Tuner simply changes the internal settings within Open Transport. These settings remain in effect until you either restart the machine or make new changes to these settings.

Additionally, OT Advanced Tuner documents can be saved as an "Auto Configure" document. You can simply double click such a document or put it in your Startup Items folder and OT Advanced Tuner will launch, load the saved settings, configure Open Transport, and then automatically quit.