Some Mac users who upgraded to OS X Yosemite have discovered a variety of wireless network connectivity issues, ranging from dropping wi-fi connections, to an inability to connect to the outside world despite being connected to a wifi router, even suddenly and strangely slow internet speeds. These network issues seem to occur most often on … Read More
When you point your iPhone or iPad at a web address (like osxdaily.com), iOS will perform a DNS lookup to send you to the proper location. DNS servers handle part of that lookup service, translating numerical IP addresses into the readable domain names we’re all more familiar with and associate with web sites and other … Read More
Mac OS X comes with a bundled port scanner tool, just one of a variety of features tucked into the ever useful Network Utility app. That means you don’t need to bother with the command line or install more advanced tools like nmap to quickly scan for open ports on a given IP or domain, … Read More
Some Mac users have recently stumbled upon a “Thunderbolt Bridge” alert dialog that shows up when they visit the Mac OS X Network preference panel, the full text of the message box says: “New Interface Detected A new network has been detected: Thunderbolt Bridge Please verify that it is configured correctly, then … Read More
Some Mac users may wish to disable IPv6 networking support on their machines. This may be desirable to avoid certain networking conflicts, or to increase security for users in higher threat environments, since IPv6 has been found by researchers to be potentially vulnerable to man-in-the-middle and other network attacks. Though most users don’t use IPv6 … Read More
If you need to find out just how fast your wi-fi link speed is, or rather, the speed of which your Mac is connected to a particular wireless router, you can find this data through the Network Utility app that is bundled in every version of Mac OS X. This is really the fastest way … Read More
Netcat is a powerful command line tool that can read and write data across a network connection using TCP/IP, it’s commonly used for relays, file transfer, port scanning, amongst other things. Though netcat origins are from the unix and linux worlds, netcat is also built into Mac OS X, and we’re going to use the … Read More
If you share your Mac on a network you may be interested to know who is connected to the Mac at any given time. This may include listing currently logged in users through a variety of network protocols, even locally, or perhaps just a history of users logins over a period of time. While Mac … Read More
Have you ever needed to know what type of security and encryption method a wireless network is using? While the Mac will figure this out itself when joining most networks, you may need to relay the information to others, or specify it yourself when joining other networks. You can get the encryption protocol in use … Read More
Using a handy network feature built into OS X and supported by most modern Macs, you can remotely wake a Mac from sleep using an iPhone (or iPod touch, iPad, and Android too). This is done using something called Wake On LAN (WOL), and it’s easy to set up in Mac OS X and use … Read More
Just about every semi-technical person has setup a wireless router at home or in the office, and in that process has wondered which broadcast channel would be the best to use. Sure, some wi-fi routers make it simple and will recommend a channel on their own, but often it’s left up to the user to … Read More
Sharing files between Macs and NAS drives and Windows PC’s has always been very easy, but Mavericks brought a slight change that has caused some problems for certain users in mixed PC and Mac environments. Without getting too geeky, Apple adjusted the default protocol for SMB (Samba, the Windows file sharing ability) from SMB1 to … Read More
The Mac OS X Firewall provides an optional ability to block all incoming network connections , offering a significant security boost to Macs that are located in untrusted networks or hostile network environments.
Network Locations in Mac OS X allow you to save specific configurations and settings for different networks. Once they’re setup, you can use them to change between various network configurations quickly, without having to re-enter any settings. These are perfect if you are switching between things like an automatic DHCP config vs a manually assigned … Read More
For those of us who use several different types of network connections to get online, you may want to take a moment to set the networking service priority in OS X. This insures that a Mac isn’t connecting through the wrong networking interface when multiple network services are available. For example, if you have a … Read More
Mac OS X includes an excellent command line network utility called “nettop” that allows users to monitor all network activity, traffic, and routes from a Mac to the outside world, both through local (LAN) and wide area (WAN) connections. If you’re unfamiliar with networking tools like this, you can think of nettop as a network … Read More
Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the iPhone has the Hotspot ability too, but we’re going to focus on getting this feature … Read More
Nmap is a powerful command line network discovery utility that lets you review network inventory, host response and uptime, and perform security auditing through port scans, OS and firewall detection, and more. Though it’s free (and open source) and ships along with many versions of linux, it doesn’t come standard with Mac OS X installations, … Read More
