Show HN: My network connection monitor for Mac

http://radiosilenceapp.com/private-eye

by aparadja • 15 years ago

146 77 15 years ago

radiosilenceapp.com

bahman20002• 15 years ago

I'm on Lion. Installed the app, launched, window comes up but connections are not listed.

Restarted the computer. Connections are still not listed.

Reinstalled as per FAQ. Still not working.

Am I doing something wrong?

aparadja24• 15 years ago

No connections come up even if you let the window stay open for a while?

Could you run "kextstat" on the terminal and see if "com.radiosilenceapp.nke.PrivateEye" is listed?

Udo2• 15 years ago

It works for me. Thanks for making this, keep up the good work!

Now if you introduce the option of blocking applications, I'd uninstall LittleSnitch for this.

bahman20002• 15 years ago

Yes

Not listed

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Update: The problem was related to 32 vs 64 bit kernels, and is fixed now. I also received an email confirmation from everyone who reported the issue that it works for them. Thanks!

nclrhombre• 15 years ago

I like the minimalism of this, just a connection monitor, nothing else. Great work!

1 feature request tough: I've installed RadioSilence also, and it would be very handy to be able to drag&drop apps from PrivateEye to RadioSilence to be silenced. Lack of this doesn't stop me from using this, but would make life a bit easier.

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Clever, thanks!

Radio Silence already supports drag & drop. Hadn't thought about the option to drag apps out of Private Eye. This just landed on my todo list.

FredBrach6• 15 years ago

Private-Eye sounds like a good entry for Tractup: http://www.tractup.com a site for early product traction. :s

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Tractup doesn't support dashes in the url :).

FredBrach6• 15 years ago

I've just fixed it =) please retry.

FredBrach6• 15 years ago

This post seems to not have been appreciated by all. I understand and I apologize for the inconvenience. It have never been my intention to abuse of this method. I will not do it again. Thx.

hmottestad3• 15 years ago

Why is the whole thing a big flash application?

elemeno• 15 years ago

Very nice looking program - can certainly see myself using it to keep track of what's going on on my Mac.

One thing I've noticed though, is that it doesn't seem to be catching network activity that's taking place from the command line. I'm running an SSH session, and just tried pinging a server from the terminal and it didn't see either of those. If you can add that as well, then it would be even more useful.

aparadja24• 15 years ago

It should notice command line ssh connections (it only logs new connections, not already established ones).

Pings aren't really connections, so it doesn't list them. I understand that it's not perhaps the best choice for it to act this way. Putting this into consideration.

ovi256• 15 years ago

It's probably using some high-level Cocoa network framework, and not kernel-level functionality like netstat does. So my guess is only apps using the same high-level net framework are listed.

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Actually, it does use kernel-level connection tracking.

oscardelben• 15 years ago

Thanks for sharing! Any chance you share the source on Github?

aparadja24• 15 years ago

My plan is to give the software away for free, but keep the distribution somewhat centralized and the source closed. The app is, on a business level, a marketing tool for my Radio Silence firewall. I hope it will drive traffic and links to the site by giving away a complementary product for free.

Sharing the source through github might work against that goal.

masklinn• 15 years ago

2 questions:

1. Why distribute as a pkg instead of a zipped .app or a dmg?

2. Why not put it on MAS?

edit: scratch that, I found the postflight script installing a kext.

bcl• 15 years ago

Or it might help you reach that goal. Opening up some of your source will give your more advanced customers more confidence in your coding abilities.

pepijndevos• 15 years ago

Java network traffic isn't listed. I tried both Minecraft and the Clojure REPL. Nothing.

It would also be useful to see the type of connection, TCP/UDP, port number, etc.

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Thanks for the info. I'll look into the Java issue. Wonder if they do something unorthodox with their traffic.

The connection details is something I've pondered about. Port numbers, at least, might be useful. At some point, the user is better served by wireshark anyway. Drawing the line isn't a trivial problem. Any suggestions are appreciated.

46Bit• 15 years ago

Looks awesome - exactly what I've been after to be honest. I'd love you if you could make it work on 10.6 as well...

sirn2• 15 years ago

Nice looking app! But why distributing it as PKG when it only creates Private Eye.app and com.radiosilenceapp.nke.PrivateEye.plist?

aparadja24• 15 years ago

It has to install the plist to /Library and launch the kext after installation. I'm not sure if that can be done just by sharing an .app bundle.

sirn2• 15 years ago

How did VMware Fusion 4 do it though? They just distributed the whole VM as a single .app, with all kexts loads/unload dynamically on launch.

doe88• 15 years ago

On Lion there is also a new useful shell command called nettop.

CyrilMazur• 15 years ago

Too bad it doesn't want to work on my Snow Leopard system

ra3• 15 years ago

I agree... Any reason why you don't want to support Snow Leopard?

aparadja24• 15 years ago

I would love to support Snow Leopard, and it's something I'll work on next. Lion simply brought some much-needed upgrades to table based UI development, which I wanted to use. It cut down the development time by a significant amount.

Supporting Snow Leopard requires a rewrite for most of the UI logic. I wanted to get the first version out before crossing that bog.

leviathan• 15 years ago

Great app.

One feature request though, it would be very useful to be able to view the complete URL of HTTP connections. God knows how many times I had to setup a local proxy to find out that information.

daviddoran• 15 years ago

I think this app works at a lower level though, by intercepting TCP connections. To show you the URL it would have to proxy all the traffic and understand the HTTP protocol.

aparadja24• 15 years ago

That's right. Of course, parsing the http requests isn't a monumental task, and it could be done. I'm just not sure whether it's worth it. Wireshark already exists, and I see no reason to compete with it.

antirez• 15 years ago

hmottestad3• 15 years ago

Bandwidth.

Bandwidth usage would be nice. This is something that little-snitch doesn't already do and you can't see it in activity monitor as far as I know.

Any chance of right-clik "record traffic to file for X seconds"?

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Bandwitdh measurement isn't trivial, but it's something I'd very much love to add. Thanks for the input.

heliostatic• 15 years ago

Beyond bandwidth monitoring on a single machine, a simple snmp monitor would be amazing...

kalleboo• 15 years ago

nettop in the command line does it (added in Lion), maybe you can scrape it out of there or find the source to it to see how it's done.

dgallagher• 15 years ago

Apple does provide this in Activity Monitor. Click the "Network" tab and you'll see "Data received:" and "Data sent:". It tally's since the last reboot.

It would be nice to have a history feature though. Plus, there's no easy way to ask "How much bandwidth do I have left this payment period before Comcast starts billing me for going over my monthly limit?"

You'd have to tally total bandwidth, and then associate it with an internet connection. You could track internet connections via DNS/public-IP info, and possibly MAC address for WAPs. If you're a laptop user jumping from WAP-to-WAP, it would be nice to know when you're online at home, or in a Starbucks, and differentiate total bandwidth used for each.

hmottestad3• 15 years ago

To clarify.

Activity monitor does not show a bandwidth usage on a process to process basis.

Since the app in the link is a list of processes and where they are connecting it would be nice to see how much bandwidth each of these connections is using.

huskyr• 15 years ago

Great work! I really like the nice clean interface.

It would be great if there would be an option to put it in the menu bar and hide it in the dock.

albertzeyer• 15 years ago

I wonder how it works, i.e. what APIs it is using, etc. Any details?

Question on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7696890/macosx-how-to-cap...

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Answered directly on SO.

fletcher• 15 years ago

It seems like you check for SYN packets, so there is no way to just see the connection currently active. This in my opinion limits the usefulness of the application, it would be cool to see an update that can have a tab for "live" connections and one for the "history". Thanks for the app anyway.

evilswan• 15 years ago

Ok what's 'helpd' and why does it call Akamai servers?

http://imgur.com/IDc5f

rhubarbquid• 15 years ago

It's probably checking for updated help files. Apple regularly uses Akamai's CDN.

makira• 15 years ago

We do something similar in one of our app, although we also permit the user to block connections it doesn't want to.

http://www.metakine.com/products/handsoff/

runjake• 15 years ago

The bandwidth suggestions are good, but rather than suggest more, I'll just say I really like the way you've laid things out. The UI lets me see data via the angles I'd want to see it.

aparadja24• 15 years ago

Thanks! I spent a decent chunk of notebook pages and pen ink to get it the way it currently is. It feels really good to hear someone appreciates the design.

andrewcooke• 15 years ago

this looks useful, so i had a look for the linux equivalent. turns out there's a command line utility called nethogs that does something similar (it shows bandwidth per process, but not addresses). for opensuse you can get it here - http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=nethogs&baseprojec...

another command, iftop, shows connections, but not processes (that's in the standard opensuse repos).

skada• 15 years ago

Is there something like this for Windows ? (Especially with ip resolution feature )

Show HN: My network connection monitor for Mac

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