Skip to main content
Home

Meerkat

An easy-to-use SSH tunnel manager built specifically for the Mac.

A perfect marriage of UNIX power with Mac elegance, Meerkat includes innovative features such as application triggers, automatic reconnection on system sleep & network change, Growl integration, Bonjour support, command-line and AppleScript integration, and much more.

Not familiar with tunnels? SSH tunnels (sometimes called port forwarding) are a way to use an SSH account on a server to forward other types of net traffic -- for example, HTTP web traffic, iTunes music sharing traffic, or SMTP email sending traffic -- through the SSH account. Then, this traffic appears to come from the SSH host instead of the original computer.

You can also read a Meerkat support forum response on why you might want to use an SSH tunnel.

Screenshots

spacer spacer spacer spacer spacer

Feature Highlights

spacer Application Triggers

Tunnels can be associated with trigger applications.

The result? Tunnels come up when their trigger apps do, so dependent apps have everything they need at the ready.

spacer Desktop 3.9M iPhone 4.4M/609K

spacer Automatic Reconnect

Meerkat will automatically detect system sleep, wake, and network events and reactivate your tunnels for you.

Your tunnels will be right where you left them, ready for use.

spacer Desktop 3.5M iPhone 4.3M/612K

spacer Tunnel Setup Assistant

Local, remote, dynamic -- not quite sure which type of tunnel you need?

Meerkat's Tunnel Setup Assistant can walk you through entering the details to get the job done.

spacer Desktop 4.2M iPhone 4.4M/630K

spacer Bonjour Support

Tunnels can advertise their presence on the local LAN with Bonjour.

Web browsers, iTunes, VNC clients, and FTP clients all speak Bonjour and can auto-detect tunneled services.

spacer Desktop 4.0M iPhone 4.7M/680K

spacer Command-Line Tools

Moving to Meerkat doesn't mean giving up your command-line tools.

Meerkat has a shell utility that can activate and deactivate tunnels and supports AppleScript osascript calls, too.

spacer Desktop 5.9M iPhone 4.1M/542K

spacer Session Launching

Meerkat can be used to quickly launch SSH sessions to all of your accounts.

It even includes support for system-wide keystrokes mapped to these accounts.

spacer Desktop 4.8M iPhone 3.6M/497K

spacer AppleScript Support

Meerkat is fully scriptable.

You can query the accounts and tunnels that have been setup, as well as activate and deactivate tunnels from AppleScript.

spacer Desktop 5.2M iPhone 3.7M/567K

Other Features

spacer

A key player

Meerkat can either store SSH passwords in the system keychain or use the public key authentication built in to SSH to manage your tunneled accounts. Either way, you hold the key, securely.

spacer

Growl, but don't bite

Meerkat notifies you of tunnel activations and deactivations via Growl, so whether by application trigger, Meerkat startup, or manually, you always know what's going on with your services.

spacer

Play with the big cats

Meerkat is fully compatible with 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. Mwrrrow!

spacer

What's on the menu

Meerkat's status bar and dock menus give you full access to your tunnels. What's more, Meerkat can be run without a dock item for a very low paw, err, footprint.

spacer

Right from the start

You can set tunnels to automatically start when Meerkat does for hassle-free port forwarding whenever you need it.

What Others Are Saying

spacer    spacer

See who's bookmarking this page on Delicious.

Read reviews and mentions of Meerkat on the web.

Check out Meerkat on i use this.

See Wakoopa's Meerkat page.

Blogging about Meerkat? Tell us about it!

No meerkats were harmed in the making of this product. Please do not taunt or feed Meerkat.
gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.