July 19, 2007
Packet tracing with the greatest of ease
Posted Jul. 19, ’07, 8:59 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips
Honestly, I love the idea of capturing packet traces. Frankly, it sounds badass, like the kind of thing those high-tech hackers are always doing in movies where things blow up for no apparent reason. There’s just something about monitoring all of the information in and out of a network interface that nets you unquestionable geek points.
So why you gotta ruin it for me, Apple? You post an Apple Care technical document on how to run a packet trace from the command line in OS X, spelling out all the arcane command switches, and how to look up the correct network interface? It’s just too easy. There’s no fun in it any more. Now anybody can run a packet trace. That’s not badass…that’s putting it in language my grandmother can understand. You even tell people when to use a zero instead of an “O”; geez!
Okay, never mind. Forget about it. I guess I’ll still have traceroutes…for now.
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I assume the traceroute thing is a joke, but check out the aptly named Network Utility application in your Utilities folder. It does ping, lookup (dig), traceroute, whoise, finger, netstat, appletalk statistics, and port scans.
/Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app, Traceroute tab. That's right, they GUIed it.
Yeah, the traceroute thing was a joke. Though, I have to say, I usually end up calling it from the terminal if I'm going to use it. It feels more authentic to me. ;)