Network Link Conditioner Freezes and Wont Start

Question

I have downloaded Hardware IO Tools for Xcode 7.1 from the Apple Developer site and installed it by opening the DMG and then double clicking Network Link Conditioner.prefPane.

I then go to my System Preferences and can see the Network Link Conditioner is there. I can go into it but as soon as I click the switch to turn it on the whole System Preferences freezes up. Also, I noticed that my keyboard seems to stop working...somewhat. I can still do cmd + spacebar and then type in there to search my system but I can't type into the URL field on safari for example.

• My Mac: OS X Yosemite v10.10.5
• My Xcode: v7.2.1 (7C1002)

By the way, I downloaded the 7.1 version of the Hardware IO Tools as they only have a 7.1 or 7.3 version, there doesn't seem to be a version for 7.2. Maybe that is the issue? I can't currently upgrade to 7.3 as that requires me to upgrade OS X to 10.11 but our company policy does not currently allow for that.

Anybody know how I could fix this?

Could this be caused by the fact that I am not an admin on my machine?

Answer 1

My suspicion was correct, it wouldn't start as it needs to be run as an admin.

If you're not an admin, you need to run a command such as

sudo /Applications/System\ Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System\ Preferences

or in my case I had to get an admin in the office to do:

su - <admin_username> /Applications/System\ Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System\ Preferences

These commands will open the System Preferences as an admin user.

I have noticed that when he Network Link Condition is open in the System Preferences, my keyboard stops working in certain areas still. For example, I couldn't type in here whilst the panel was open (even with it turned off) but as soon as I closed the panel I could type again. I will possibly open another question at a later dare about this though.