MiniLink

A macOS menu bar app to monitor and connect to your remote Mac —
over LAN, Tailscale, or Thunderbolt bridge — with one-click SSH & SMB, live latency, and a built-in port scanner.

简体中文 · English

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Why?

If you run a headless Mac mini / Mac Studio as a home server, build machine, or AI box, you probably juggle several IPs for the same machine: the LAN address at home, a Tailscale address when you're out, maybe a Thunderbolt bridge for fast file transfers. Before every connection you wonder: which route is up right now? Is the Thunderbolt cable even plugged in? Is SSH running? Did my SMB mount go stale after switching networks?

MiniLink answers all of that at a glance from your menu bar — and connects you with one click.

Features

• 🚦 Multi-route status — define any number of routes (LAN / Tailscale / Thunderbolt / VPN / …) to the same machine; each shows a live reachability dot, ping latency, and whether SSH is actually up on that route, with the fastest route badged
• ⚡ One-click connect — SSH opens Terminal with ssh user@ip; SMB mounts the share in Finder (credentials come from your Keychain)
• 🔄 Inbound connection status — see when the remote Mac (or anyone) is connected to this machine and on which service (SSH / SMB / VNC …), tagged to the route it came in on — handy for keeping an eye on a headless server
• 🔌 Port monitor — watch the ports you care about (SSH 22, SMB 445, VNC 5900, or your own services) and see open/closed live, probed via the fastest reachable route
• 🔍 Common port scan — one click scans ~26 well-known ports (SSH, SMB, AFP, VNC, Ollama, LM Studio, ComfyUI, Jupyter, dev servers…) and lets you add discovered ports to the monitor list
• 💾 SMB mount manager — see currently mounted shares and eject them in one click (no more Finder hanging on a stale mount after a network switch)
• 🖥️ "This Mac" tab — your username, hostname, per-interface IPs as copy-ready ssh user@ip commands (for connecting back to this machine), plus all local listening ports with process names — instantly see what's exposed on all interfaces vs localhost-only
• 🌐 English & 中文 — switchable in Settings, or follow the system language
• 🪶 Native & tiny — pure SwiftUI + Network.framework, no Electron, no dependencies, no telemetry; everything stays on your machine

Download

Grab the prebuilt app — no Xcode needed:

1. Download MiniLink.zip from the latest release
2. Unzip it, then drag MiniLink.app into Applications
3. Open it. macOS will warn "unidentified developer" (the app is ad-hoc signed, not notarized) — right-click the app → Open to confirm once, then it launches normally from then on

Build from source

Requires Xcode Command Line Tools, macOS 14+:

git clone https://github.com/ethan6945/MiniLink.git
cd MiniLink
./build.sh
open build/MiniLink.app     # or drag it into /Applications

First run notes:

• The default route IPs are examples — open Settings in the popover and set your own IPs, SSH username, and routes (add/remove as many as you like)
• The first time you click SSH, macOS asks for permission to control Terminal — click Allow
• For Launch at login, run it from /Applications

CLI self-check

The same binary doubles as a command-line network check — handy for scripts and debugging:

./build/MiniLink.app/Contents/MacOS/MiniLink --check

== Routes ==
LAN 192.168.1.100: reachable 0.3 ms
Tailscale 100.101.102.103: reachable 0.6 ms
Thunderbolt 169.254.1.1: unreachable
== Ports (via LAN 192.168.1.100) ==
22 SSH / Remote Login: open
445 SMB file sharing: open

How it works

• Latency: one ICMP ping per route per refresh (/sbin/ping subprocess) — no special privileges needed
• Port probes: TCP handshake via Network.framework NWConnection with a 2 s timeout
• Local ports: netstat for the complete listener list, lsof to annotate process names
• Mounts: parsed from mount, ejected via NSWorkspace
• Checks run concurrently and pause to a slow cadence while the popover is closed

Use cases

Headless Mac mini home server · remote access to your Mac over Tailscale · Thunderbolt IP bridge between two Macs · monitoring an Ollama / LM Studio / ComfyUI machine · checking which route is fastest before a big SMB file transfer · quickly seeing what ports your Mac exposes on the network.

Support ☕

MiniLink is free and open source. If it saves you time, consider buying me a coffee — it keeps the project going!

License

MIT © Ethan Tan