Network Utility Deprecated in macOS Big Sur

[hanske68]

Fof, Apple does indeed 'cripple' the filesystem. Finder does a lot of juggling on top of the filesystem, where all kinds of (private) data is stored somewhere (secretly), whether in plists, private directories, files, extended attributes etc. This is all undocumented and subject to change. Lacking API's for developers. Hardly doable on CLI. As such I doubt a robust and reliable solution exists. As I quite often read about filesystem trickery, I'll keep your question in mind. In the meantime I'd suggest filing a complaint at Apple: if nobody does, nothing is going to change for the better.

 

[Truffy]

Used it probably 4 times in last 16 years.

okay then

 

[Yebubbleman]

See, my main point is that I already went over the man pages of not just ifconfig but of other commands, I was entertaining the idea of building my own menu bar icon even, this is not being afraid of the Terminal is that what should be (and was, with the Network Utility) the most basic information about your connection such as its speed, now has you going through commands man pages, parameters, regular expressions (grep), and memorizing a command that its probably now large or even changes depending on the interface number assigned to your external ethernet adaptor and so perhaps building a script or at the very least adding an Alias to your terminal source file, all tasks that can change depending on your macOS version or configuration such as if you’re still using bash or have zshell as your terminal, it might not be quite as super casual or out of the box as you make it out to be.

You’re using an OS for a reason, you expected basic things to come baked in because even if you could build your own utility you might have other things to do.

I'm not at all trying to suggest that building GUI utilities that handle functions more commonly associated with UNIX commands isn't worthwhile. Actually, I think that's freakin' awesome!

What I AM trying to suggest is that the notion of this oft-used functionality being completely removed just because it requires a few simple keystrokes in terminal is nonsense. Network Utility was hidden for about four iterations of macOS before it was removed outright. You HAD to hunt for it in order to use it. And mind you, with the exact same effort that it would take to just look up the UNIX command for whatever it is you were trying to find out.

You keep saying this for months or years now, but it doesn't become true. While there definitely ARE some tabs in Network Utility that directly correspond to terminal commands, not all do. There is no terminal command by the name of "Lookup" that gives the IP addresses of a given website, for example.

If you want to impress me (and prove that you're a real expert in using terminal and Unix), provide me with the terminal commands that change the permissions of the User's Documents folder in Monterey to make it possible to change its icon in finder.

nslookup

Or are you really going to nitpick about the "ns" part?

Guys, don't get me wrong. I DO know how to get the information I want in Terminal, no help needed. My point was a different one: to show that it is simply WRONG that every tab in Network Utility directly corresponds to the IDENTICALLY NAMED command in Terminal, as Yebubbleman keeps saying over and over again. It doesn't become true through repetition. NSLOOKUP isn't LOOKUP, and there are several ways in macOS to do a DNS lookup - and it certainly doesn't help that they give different results! To try it out, put the web address of your choice into the /etc/host file and point it to localhost - then check what the different tools give you as the IP address. Every tool that has any respect for Unix must give the identical result, 127.0.0.1. but they don't. Apple has deeply messed this up...

*cough* Nitpicking *cough*

Regarding my other point, the icon of the Documents folder in Monterey: this is way more difficult than you all (or most) may think. I have dug way into extended file attributes (which are mostly undocumented as soon as it becomes interesting), and still haven't found how Apple protects the icon of this folder in detail. That's why I challenged Yebubbleman: impress me with a Terminal command that makes the folder icon changeable.

You cannot make changes to those folder icons as those are protected by both System Integrity Protection and further protected by the fact that the system volume is (a) only mounted as a snapshot, (b) is otherwise permanently unmounted, and (c) only able to be modified by software updates from Apple.

Signed (or "Sealed" depending on which version of the documentation you read) System Volume (SSV). Look it up.

 

[chucker23n1]

nslookup

Or are you really going to nitpick about the "ns" part?

Keep in mind this will not match Safari's lookup behavior.

 

[Truffy]

Network Utility was hidden for about four iterations of macOS before it was removed outright. You HAD to hunt for it in order to use it.

I'm gonna call BS on that: CMD+SPACE "net" brought it up instantaneously. I seriously never realise that it'd been moved, because I never had to go looking for it.

 

[Yebubbleman]

I'm gonna call BS on that: CMD+SPACE "net" brought it up instantaneously. I seriously never realise that it'd been moved, because I never had to go looking for it.

That doesn't negate the fact that Apple was moving it to increasingly user-unfriendly locations over the course of several macOS releases and, through its own analysis, deeming it not necessary. And to be fair, the vast majority of people complaining in this thread about this utility being gone are either Terminal-phobic, lazy, or both. Alternatives do exist. Apple deprecates many beloved commonly used feature sets (that don't have functional equivalents) all the time. This isn't one of those feature sets.

 

[RandySK]

This was a useful utility and it was better to have clients use this than to try to explain terminal commands to them. There is no reason for Apple to remove this.

 

[Batt4Christ]

Yep - there is no logical reason to drop this useful little app. So convenient for doing traceroutes and even ping tests. So what if it isn't used by most people with significant frequency - the code itself can't be particularly complicated (especially if it is just a GUI for the command line/unix stuff.)

 

[bici]

ping example.com

 

[noraa]

Well I just discovered this lovely gem - Neo Network Utility by DEVONtechnologies (maker of DEVONthink). It's literally the same thing as the old Network Utility program, but compatible with all modern macOS'

You can find it here: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware (scroll down a short ways to find it). The direct download is: https://download.devontechnologies....workutility/1.1.1/Neo_Network_Utility.dmg.zip

 

[Rassama]

Thank you @noraa, this is great: free and from a reliable developer. Couldn’t ask for more.

From the site:

All similarities with an application of the same name that was once bundled with legacy versions of Mac OS X and OSX are, of course, purely coincidental.

Sure… 😉