Software that turns a
mac into a
router, essentially. Created by
sustainable networks. It basically puts a gui on not-normally-activated features in
Open Transport. It lets you do things like assigning multiple
IPs to the same computer, and-- more importantly--
ip masquerading. You can use IPNetRouter (as i do) as a simple way to share a single IP (say, from a
DSL modem) transparently among several computers, or if you feel like it you can set up a full-blown
firewall with
DHCP for the computers behind it and
filtering and
NAT and
inbound port mapping and all those other nifty things. It is, of course, not a good idea to put a firewall on a mac, since the mac has no
memory protection and is
crash-prone, but as long as the mac is not being regularly used while IPNetRouter is on it it should be perfectly safe. I can't comment authoritatively on how IPNR does in terms of
performance when compared to the equivalent (
free)
linux/
unix utilities, but i can tell you the
learning curve on the user interface for the administrator is not nearly as steep.
IPNetRouter is $80 (although there is an educational discount) but has a full demo with no features crippled, so you can try it out and make sure it works for what you need it to before you decide to use it. I dunno if you would really want to use it for anything critical, but for a quick-fix it works beautifully.
IPNetRouter is not available for Mac OS X, and i do not believe they plan for it to be in the future. You can get the same features, however, with a combination of natd and ipfw on the terminal command line. Some third-party GUIs exist for this.