Sustainable Softworks (known as Sustworks, for short), developers of Internet and security software, will be discussing new products for Mac OS X and the latest version of their Mac OS 9 tools in the MacTech Central area at this week’s Macworld San Francisco.
Peter Sichel, president and chief engineer, and Ben Lachman, developer of gnat (which was bought by Sustworks last fall) will be talking about IPNetShareX. IPNetShareX, of which gnat forms the basis, is Sustwork’s entry-level Internet connection sharing program that gives users graphical access to the Mac OS X Network Address Translation (natd) services. Natd is an inherent Mac OS X service that can be set up to share a single Internet connection among multiple computers without requiring a dedicated hardware router.
It doesn’t contain the more powerful features (such as filtering, DHCP server and port mapping) of Sustwork’s IPNetRouter software, but can still serve many simple network needs, according to Sichel. Sichel will also unveil a beta version of IPNetMonitorX, the Mac OS X version of the company’s set of Internet utilities, such as Ping, Traceroute, Whois, NSLookup and more. The OS X version is developed in Cocoa with BSD networking.
In addition to their Mac OS X products, Sustworks will show the latest version of their OS 9 products at MWSF, including IPNetMonitor, which has been updated to version 2.5.2 and adds support for displaying TXT records in NSLookup. Also on display will be version 1.6.3 of IPNetRouter, the Internet sharing software. IPNetRouter is now capable of serving as a DynDNS.org client. The new version of IPNetRouter will automatically tell DynDNS.org when a user’s public IP address changes.
What’s more, IPNetSentry 1.3.2, the company’s personal firewall application, now has several enhancements of particular interest to Webmasters, including the ability to add or remove filters through AppleScript. IPNetSentry recently was updated to be compatible with Opera and iCab browsers. Sustworks will also demonstrate IPNetTuner, which allows users to optimize any type of Internet connection for peak performance.
The products range in price from US$25 for IPNetTuner to $89 for IPNetRouter. All can be downloaded at the Sustworks Web site.