
GEEKTOOL FACEBOOK HOW TO
There are other ways to see similar information from the command line, including lsof, open_ports, and then, branching away from the command line a bit you can use GeekTool with lsof to have a list of live network connections printed directly over the OS X desktop wallpaper.įor the mobile world with iOS, you can find some similar information with the free networking scanning Fing app, it’s quite a bit more limited but still useful enough to have around on the iPhone and iPad.This article shows you how to display your ToDo lists (tasks) on your desktop, with the help of a free 3rd party application called GeekTool. Using the -m flag you can also limit nettop to only show TCP or UDP sockets, with nettop -m tcp and nettop -m udp The routing information will show the connections from hardware to destination IP, for example, you may see en0 (wi-fi) to the local network IP to a remote server, and you will also see loopback information. You can also use nettop to just view routing table information if you don’t want to see specific sockets and processes

Open Terminal from /Applications/Utilities, and at the command prompt, type “nettop” to immediately see active network connections and traffic:


Getting started with nettop is easy enough. Using nettop to Monitor Network Traffic & Connections
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Command line tools aren’t for everyone though, and for users who would like to view similar network information in a more traditional OS X app format, the free Mac app Private Eye is an excellent GUI tool that provides similar information.

Nettop has a wide variety of uses, but it can be particularly helpful when trying to determine what is using the Macs internet connection and networking interfaces, what is communicating with what and how much data is being transferred, and it’s also just a great utility for network troubleshooting. It’s a bit like the standard ‘top’ and ‘htop’ commands which show process and resource information, but rather than showing CPU and RAM usage, it will show live network transfer information like packets sent and received, packet size, and total data transferred. If you’re unfamiliar with networking tools like this, you can think of nettop as a network centric task manager, displaying active networking connections, sockets and routes, their respective names and process id, the state of the connection and whether the connection is established, waiting, or listening, and information about individual process data transfer.
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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.
