The Mac seems to lack built in utilities to look at networking statistics. On PCs I know where to find wifi tools to look at signal strength, etc. And with task manager I can monitor traffic over wifi or ethernet. Am I missing something on the Mac? Also, is iStumble useful?
(I'm in the middle of transfering 100 GB to the share drive of my "big" pc using wifi, and would like monitor stuff w/o walking to the other room. With big drives and big files, the USB drive thing starts to break down as a Mac/PC bridge, besides I left my 1TB drive at work.)
Check out Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder. Select the Network tab at the bottom. Not too detailed, but you can see bytes per second in and out as well as some running totals. Do you need something more than that?
If you option-click on the WiFi icon at the top right of your screen you'll see a bunch more details about your connection (assuming you have that icon there - if not you can check 'Show Airport Status in the menu bar' in the Network Preference Pane.) If you want to see that sort of info for other base stations in range, then iStumbler is good. Or I use the similar AP Grapher. If there are lots of base stations around these programs are very useful since you can see if everyone else is, say, on channel 1 then you can set yours for channel 6 or 11 and get much less interference.
thx!
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(I'm in the middle of transfering 100 GB to the share drive of my "big" pc using wifi, and would like monitor stuff w/o walking to the other room. With big drives and big files, the USB drive thing starts to break down as a Mac/PC bridge, besides I left my 1TB drive at work.)
- mark 4-20-2009 1:34 am
Check out Activity Monitor in your Utilities folder. Select the Network tab at the bottom. Not too detailed, but you can see bytes per second in and out as well as some running totals. Do you need something more than that?
If you option-click on the WiFi icon at the top right of your screen you'll see a bunch more details about your connection (assuming you have that icon there - if not you can check 'Show Airport Status in the menu bar' in the Network Preference Pane.) If you want to see that sort of info for other base stations in range, then iStumbler is good. Or I use the similar AP Grapher. If there are lots of base stations around these programs are very useful since you can see if everyone else is, say, on channel 1 then you can set yours for channel 6 or 11 and get much less interference.
- jim 4-20-2009 1:43 am [add a comment]
thx!
- mark 4-20-2009 2:38 am [add a comment]