Ever wonder what’s causing all those quickly blinking data transfer lights on your home network router when there should be little activity taking place? Or perhaps your network’s performance is off and you don’t know why, or you suspect one of your applications is connecting to outside resources?
These are viable questions to anyone who maintains the performance and security of a network, home or otherwise.
A couple of years ago I found a wonderful little tool that makes answering these questions much easier, and you don’t have to ‘break-the-bank’ to do it.
Application:
The application is FrameSeer from LGOSystem Pty Ltd, a small company based in Canberra, Australia, which specializing in developing software for Mac OS X.
FrameSeer is a native Mac OS X (“Cocoa/Aqua”) network packet capture application that runs on OS X 10.4.5 or later and is an excellent tool to diagnose, monitoring and troubleshooting network traffic.
FrameSeer can capture traffic on your Ethernet, AirPort, PPPoE (eg aDSL or cable-modem), PPP (eg dial-up modem) and loopback interfaces. FrameSeer can also open tcpdump files captured either on Mac OS X systems or on little-endian systems such as Linux.
As with most well designed Mac applications you install FrameSeer by simply dropping it into your Applications Folder. Built-in online help is user friendly and will guide you through using the applications and almost everything you’ll need to know about TCP/IP networking.
Operation:
Running FrameSeer brings you to the well designed and user friendly main window. Beginning a new ‘Capture Document’ is as simple as selecting the active network interface port and clicking the ‘Start” button.
If you need to capture packets from multiple interfaces simultaneously you may open multiple ‘Capture Documents’ or you can even run multiple captures on the same interface with filtering options set so you can view different packets from the same interface separately.
By selecting a packet of captured traffic and clicking on the ‘Decode” tab you may view, print or copy to the clipboard a packet’s content.
FrameSeer also has easy and informative traffic display features to map point-to-point paths, traffice percents by protocol types and percents by packet size. I’ve captured screen shots below of these capabilities.
Conclusion:
I’ve used FrameSeer on numerous occasions to resolve problems on a network but you don’t have to have a serious problem to find FrameSeer to be of use. You’ll could be surprised to find out what’s running on your network.
At US $49.00 FrameSeer is a bargain for your Mac OS X network toolbox.