DEVONtechnologies Resurrects Network Utility
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, 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 DEVONtechnologies—Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann and Christian Grunenberg—just released Neo Network Utility, a near-clone of the app we remember fondly. It’s free from the DEVONtechnologies 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 developer Jeff Johnson told me you could use an old version of Apple’s Network Utility if you ad hoc code-sign it. That is left as an exercise for the reader.
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, leveraging the networkQuality tool Apple introduced with Monterey (see “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.
It exactly is the
networkqualitycommand line tool.Hate to be that guy, but are we sure this is 100% legit? Been hearing so much about benign-looking apps turning out to be bundled with malware. Others might share my hesitation, so it’s worth getting the reassurance out there–I think!
Yes, it’s 100% legit. I’ve corresponded with Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann about it, so I know the entire story behind their decision to create it. Basically, they missed the old Network Utility and it just wasn’t that hard to put a graphical interface on the command-line tools.
And yes, Eric confirmed it is networkQuality. :-)
Thank you!
Perfect, I was disappointed when Network Utility was dumped as I used it often at work and I’m not great at remembering terminal commands. It seemed such an unnecessary deprecation as I couldn’t imagine it being a difficult app to update.
Thanks to DevonTech.
I find it mildly annoying that Apple’s Network Utility was deprecated back to Big Sur, but Neo Network Utility requires Ventura or newer. (And yes, I downloaded it to double-check.) There are still plenty of us using Big Sur and/or Monterey (the latter of which has not yet been obsoleted, and won’t be until Sequoia reaches official release) for a variety of reasons, and we are sadly left out again.
I understand not wanting to support out-of-date systems too heavily, but the minimum macOS for Apple Silicon machines is Big Sur, not Ventura. Those who purchased M1 Macs when they were released could easily still be running Big Sur or Monterey. I’m skeptical that
networkQualitychanged enough between either Big Sur or Monterey and Ventura to make the older two unreasonable to support with this new utility.I believe the Ventura system requirements come from the development environment and associated libraries, not any limitation from networkQuality or the other command line tools.
On Mastodon, Jeff Johnson said that you could copy Network Utility from Catalina and ad hoc codesign it.
Very glad to have this back.
I’m not in any great need for this—I already know the command line foo—but I’m happy for those whose hearts this gladdens. And, for sure, it’s been a long time since Apple have had quite that level of dedication to making the technical underpinnings of their computing platform “accessible” in quite the same way.
I’d miss Activity Monitor if they took that away, though. And, actually, doing all that it does at the CLI in the same way isn’t nearly as straightforward.
I’m so happy to hear this! I used to use Network Utility a lot and carefully copied it from system to system after it was deprecated, but somehow finally lost it along the way. I think it may have worked up through Big Sur or even Monterey.
At one point didn’t Apple hide it in the /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications folder rather than Utilities? I know I finally installed an alias to it in my Finder window toolbar. CoreServices is currently where Apple’s DVD Player lives also; because I have an alias to it in my Applications I don’t know if they’re trying to bury that one too.
Devon Technologies has given us quite a few extremely useful free utilities in the past, especially for the Services contextual menu. I would have no hesitation trusting something they offer.
Great tip! Got Whatroute to replace the traceroute functionality, but here is the full Network Utilty. https://www.whatroute.net but they also got some nice extra functionality.
That is where it is in Monterey, but it just brings up a note that it is depreciated and to use Terminal.
What are the system requirements? I couldn’t find them on the site.
As somebody who a just today added macOS 12 & 13 support to an app that had been built only for macOS 14, I can say with certainty that it is a hassle and Apple is to blame. Especially if they’re using SwiftUI and Swift, but even if they’re just using the most recent version of Xcode. To support older systems you essentially need an additional development machine. It’s a real mess but Apple don’t care because they only look forwards.
Ventura or later. I downloaded it in Monterey to find out.
Thanks, Al. My MBP is limited to Monterey. However, my iMac is limited to High Sierra, so I still have Network Utility there.
It says on the download page for Whatroute, but for the DevonThink program it says on the link Adam supplied: “It requires macOS 13 Ventura, so Macs running macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS 12 Monterey will have to continue relying on Terminal”.
As far as I can tell, this app is not IPv6 aware.
WhatRoute is.
IPv6 IMO is very important because it enables us to self-host our data whatever that may be - web server, mail server, CalDev and CarDev, etc
Where I live – in the Netherlands – it is relatively easy to expose several IPv6 addresses via DMZ, but IPv6 works differently than IPv4 and so lack of IPV6 compatibility in a NetWork utility in 2024 could be considered a show stopper.
Which the DEVONtechnologies programmer is doing.
Me too! Horrible experience, but the type of thing where you hope you’re doing the right thing for some future version of yourself.
Was very happy to see this become available, but I do have one gripe: “Speed” returns rates that are a factor of 20 (downlink) and 200 (uplink) slower than Ookla’s Speedtest app report on FiOS — and I can confirm the Speedtest numbers.
Tried it again a couple of days later, and I get an uplink figure now that is ~ 10% of the otherwise measured value, but a reasonable downlink figure.
Has anyone else seen such discrepancies?
The app uses Apple’s networkQuality command line tool, which I wrote about here. It should have roughly similar numbers, though.
networkQuality -d to force an uplink only test returns the correct figures. The developers might want to think about doing the uplink and downlink tests sequentially by default — as, say, Speedtest does.
Is this the full extent of crib notes for the reader exercise referred to in the article:
Unfortunately:
Am I just out of luck and condemned to using Terminal?
I imagine anyone with a Catalina installation could send it to you, and codesigning seems to be just a matter of a Terminal command.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-can-i-ad-hoc-codesign-a-ma-ufy.j4AoQqGWUx8k5kzZKQ
It’s also possible that an update to Neo Network Utility will extend compatibility backward.
Just try it.
If you need to ad-hoc code sign it, here’s a guide and the command:
WhatRoute requires 10.11 or later (see WhatRoute - Geo-Tracing Software for MacOS X - Download).