app to monitor traffic to and from my machine...

othelloothello
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
a friend has asked me for help on something.



does anyone know of an OS X app that will show network traffic from his machine to the outside world? he wants to see if any applications/system resources are accessing the web without his knowledge...



cheers

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    vandewaalsvandewaals Posts: 450member
    <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/rominar/download.html"; target="_blank">NetMonitor</a>



    or



    <a href="http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/index.html"; target="_blank">MenuMeters</a>



    The second adds a Pref Pane to System Prefs. It also includes menu bar indicators for CPU, disk, and memory usage. I recently started using it in place of NetMonitor. NetMonitor is more customizable though, if that's all your friend cares about keeping tabs on.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Well, you have a few options.



    I run NetMonitor so I can watch to see if there are spikes of data being sent by any of my applications or if something is being sent to my computer. There are many options including variable graph size, a textual display of the throughput, display in a window or menu item or the dock, etc. Here's a snapshot of how mine is currently set up:







    If he wants to set up a firewall to actually stop incoming or outgoing data, I'd suggest using BrickHouse. BrickHouse has a nice feature for enabling and reading log entries of packets that are transmitted/received but are denied by the firewall rules. Here's a snapshot of a brief period in my log with a number of denied entries. Note that the log gives the IP address and port number of the source and destination as well as which firewall rule number denied it.







    If you really want to start snooping around the connection, though, you can use a packet sniffer. One free tool that interfaces with the tcpdump command is MacSniffer. Here's a brief capture I did when accessing <a href="http://www.google.com"; target="_blank">www.google.com</a> in my web browser:







    I'm sure there are more tools for doing this, but these are my top 3.



    Hope this helps.



    [ 02-05-2003: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
  • Reply 3 of 3
    othelloothello Posts: 1,054member
    ah, excellent!



    cheers guys
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