Every once in a while, you might wonder what’s happening on your home network. It’s at those times you might wish you’d have known about today’s tip, a dead-simple way to access the network activity on your network via OS X Lion’s Terminal app.
Granted, you could be using something like Little Snitch, but if you’d rather pop open Terminal, here’s how you can do some similar sleuthing for possible network issues.
First, launch Terminal. That should go without saying, but what the heck, we like being clear. Once it launches, type or paste the following command into the Terminal window that appears:
nettop
Yep, that’s it. You’re simply launching a command-line interface (CLI) app that is already present on your system, without you even knowing about it. According to the folks at Macworld, this hasn’t been available until Mac OS X Lion. Pretty slick, I think.
If you maximize the terminal window, you’ll see all sorts of sweet info about your network connections. If you want to learn more about how the app works, type this into a new Terminal window:
nettop --help
You’ll get the built-in manual pages for nettop, including the keys that can be used to navigate around, and which network traffic you’re looking at (tcp and udp by default).
To quit nettop, you can hit Control-C or you can close the window and then click on the “Close” button that comes up.
Got an OS X tip? Need help troubleshooting OS X? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.
