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OT Advanced Tuner 1.3.6 ($25 Trialware) Apple's implementation of the TCP/IP protocol, supported under an architecture known as Open Transport, serves the needs of millions of Mac users who want to connect to the Internet. Like other TCP/IP implementations, Open Transport maintains an internal list of parameters which affect its performance. It also keeps track of many dynamic values which change as you are using your Mac on a network. Unfortunately, these parameters and values are normally not available to the average Mac user. For those who want to take a peek under the hood, and even tinker a bit, OT Advanced Tuner is for you. The first major feature of OT Advanced Tuner is the ability to view and change the value of TCP/IP parameters. There are about 50 of these values, so we can't go into great detail about all of them. But they seem to fall into three general categories. The first type of parameter affects the behavior of certain TCP/IP features, such as IP forwarding. In this specific case, you can decide to not allow forwarding, or to only allow it under certain circumstances.
Change the Behavior of TCP/IP on Your Mac The second type of parameter has to do with time. Several actions under TCP/IP involve a time-out, where your computer will wait a set amount for something to happen (like connecting to a server), or not happen. If you are on a high speed, hardwired network, you may not need these values to be set very high, since response times are usually fast. The third type of parameter involves size. For certain operations, there are a minimum and maximum size for the information being sent. Like the previous example, if you are on a high-speed network, you may be able to increase these values to get better performance.
Network Geeks Can Finally View a Routing Table Another important feature of OT Advanced Tuner is the ability to view internal data tables, such as physical interface status, routing tables and the like. Users of other platforms are used to obtaining this information via a command line interface and arcane commands like "netstat" and "ifconfig". All of this detailed technical information is available in this most recent release of OT Advanced Tuner. Fortunately, OT Advanced Tuner includes several predefined configurations, like Cable Modem, that you can try before going at it on your own. In either case, OT Advanced Tuner lets you assume the maximum amount of control over your network behavior. Have any other Mac OS Networking Gadgets you'd like us to look at? Let John know via e-mail, or share it with the rest of us in the Mac Gadget Forum. |
