Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons
license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary
on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the
entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/


                  DEVONtechnologies Resurrects Network Utility

   Adam Engst

   Network Utility was a fixture of macOS from its early days through
   macOS 11 Big Sur, when Apple dropped it, instead directing users to use
   command line tools. Apple's argument seemed to be that the only people
   who needed the tools Network Utility provided ' things like netstat,
   ping, lookup, whois, traceroute, whois, and finger'were advanced users
   already familiar with using those tools on the command line.

   Perhaps that's true for network-involved sysadmins, but I suspect many
   of us occasionally want to use some of these tools and would prefer a
   graphical interface to a bunch of text scrolling by in a Terminal
   window. And I do mean occasionally'it was probably a year before I
   internalized that Network Utility was gone, and I've missed it only a
   few times since.

   But I did miss it, so I was delighted to learn that the fine folks at
   [1]DEVONtechnologies'Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann and Christian
   Grunenberg'[2]just released Neo Network Utility, a near-clone of the
   app we remember fondly. It's free from the DEVONtechnologies
   [3]Download page. It requires macOS 13 Ventura, so Macs running macOS
   11 Big Sur and macOS 12 Monterey will have to continue relying on
   Terminal.

   Although I can't easily compare against the original, Neo Network
   Utility appears to provide all the same capabilities and more. For
   instance, I don't believe the Lookup screen previously offered a choice
   of information providers (nslookup, dnscacheutil, and dig).

   The Speed screen is completely new, and I don't know what command line
   tools it leverages. However, when you select 'Show advanced diagnostics
   data' in the Speed screen, the Responsiveness metric suggests it uses
   the networkQuality tool Apple introduced with Monterey (see '[4]Use
   Apple's networkQuality Tool to Test Internet Responsiveness,' 22 April
   2022).

   Ultimately, if you dabble in network testing and miss Apple's Network
   Utility like me, I encourage you to download DEVONtechnologies' Neo
   Network Utility. Stash it in your Utilities folder for the next time
   you're curious about what's happening with your network or Internet
   servers.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://www.devontechnologies.com/
   2. https://www.devontechnologies.com/blog/20240711-network-utility-10
   3. https://www.devontechnologies.com/support/download
   4. https://tidbits.com/2022/04/22/use-apples-networkquality-tool-to-test-internet-responsiveness/

   Hidden links:
   5. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/08/Network-Utility-deprecated.png
   6. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/08/Neo-Network-Utility-Lookup.png
   7. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/08/Neo-Network-Utility-Speed.png

.