Nov

18

Net Monitor Sidekick: Monitor Traffic For IP/Port

ImageI have yet to find a really good application to monitor all traffic coming to/leaving from a Mac, but this one is close.

With Net Monitor Sidekick you just start the application, choose your network interface, and watch the traffic flow. The program offers a few preferences, but pretty much does as expected out of the box.

Right now, the program is in beta and can be downloaded free. Though there is a warning that the beta will expire on Mar 31, 2009.

You can down the application here.

We try to help the common man set up a Mac server. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Sep

10

Seven iPhone Apps For IT

ImageIf you’re reading this blog, you probably have a Mac server setup somewhere that requires your attention occasionally. For those of you with an iPhone, I hope to help you out.

Over on the Macminicolo.net site, I’ve put together a list of seven iPhone applications that I use every day to work with the Mac servers and IT work in general. You can read it here.

Jul

25

Throttle Bandwidth On A Mac With ipfw

The other day, I had a server that would turn on and immediately start pushing 80+Mb/s. Needless to say, something was wrong.

I didn’t want to compromise the network, so I turned to ipfw to create a bandwidth limited pipe to apply to the port. This hint on MacOSXhints.com explains it nicely.

Advanced OS X users know that Darwin comes with ipfw, which can be used to set up a custom firewall. This same service however can be used to also limit bandwidth on specific ports.

Example:
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 15KByte/s
creates a pipe that only allows up to 15KB/s to go through.

Then:
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
will attach that pipe to the outgoing traffic on port 80, effectively limiting the outgoing traffic of the web server.
sudo ipfw delete 1
will remove the pipe from the port.

Of course, you can also find a GUI interface to this in WaterRoof.

Jun

25

Locamatic: Automatically Change Location

ImageThis one isn’t directly connected to running a server, but it’s incredibly useful for those that are on the move quite often. (And those who are on the move quite often usually have servers, so there’s my justification.)

Most of my internet time is spent at my house, my office, or the data center. In all three places I have static ip’s for port forwarding, etc. For each spot, I have a “Location” setup on my MacBook Air. I got tired of manually changing the location each time I moved around so I went searching and I found Locamatic.

Locamatic is a preference pane that will automatically change your Location based on whatever network your Airport card joins.

I’ve had it setup for a week now and it’s worked flawlessly switching me between locations.

If this sounds useful, you can it here for free.