🦊 Netfox 0.21.0 — the question about file sharing nobody asks
Hey everyone 👋
Netfox 0.21.0 is out, and it is mostly one feature plus a confession.
🔐 Port 445 now tells you which version of file sharing a device actually speaks.
File sharing is the port on your network most likely to be running something it shouldn't. So Netfox now asks two questions of it instead of one:
Which version would your Mac and that device actually use? The newest one they have in common — SMB 3.1.1 on anything current, something older on a device nobody has updated in years.
Does it still accept SMB 1? Asked separately, and that separation is the whole trick. A device that speaks only SMB 1 does not answer a modern request at all — so a single check would report it as nothing, which is the exact opposite of what you want to know.
SMB 1 is the protocol WannaCry spread over. Microsoft turned it off by default in 2017, and it is still quietly on in the corner of plenty of home networks: an old NAS, a printer with a scan-to-folder share, a router's USB disk. Netfox names it, and names a version that has no encryption to offer at all.
And if it cannot settle the question, it says nothing rather than telling you it is off. A reassuring line about a question nobody managed to ask is worse than no line.
⚡ The confession: the landing screen was costing you a processor.
The radar on the Overview animated for as long as you left it open. Measured on a release build, sitting idle: 9.6% of a processor on that screen against 0.6% on any other. About four fifths of what the window cost while doing nothing at all — against a comment in my own code claiming "well under 1%". It now runs its sweep and stops.
🙈 And one that stings: a switch that said no was not being obeyed.
The Overview builds its link panel three different ways depending on how wide the window is. The one the default window size lands in skipped the guard, so with the outbound lookup switched off, that panel still reached outside your network. The two arrangements that were correct were the rare ones — which is exactly why it survived this long.
🌍 Plus: three things were showing English to people who do not read it.
Every service description in the Ports tab, the Settings search rows, and a port number formatted as though it were a quantity — port 8,080 in English, 8.080 in German and Dutch, 8 080 in French. All six languages fixed, and there is now a check that looks for that whole class of mistake rather than for the instances somebody happened to remember.
Free, universal binary, signed and notarized, macOS 15.6+.
Would love to hear what you'd like to see next 🦊
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