Mailing List Archive

Questions: some short, some long
Greetings all,

I'm back to work after a 5 month school break, and have again picked up our
network usage project pretty much where it was left off. I've been playing
around with the CVS version of Ntop from yesterday with limited success
(runtimes of between .5 to 2.5h+ on a ~3Mbit line on a RH 7.1 box before
coredump). I have a few questions:

1. I've noticed that the Thruput is now the Network Load. Has the issue of
kB vs kb in the graph scale been corrected as well?

2. Is there a changelog to go with the CVS daily snapshot that I'm just not
seeing? This would be most handy to get an idea of the bugs fixed/changes
made on a daily basis. A list of open issues would be good for people to
start helping track these bugs down as well.

3. Is there an ETA on the release of the next stable version/snapshot? I'm
looking to deploy Ntop at about 15 sites and am deciding whether to wait for
a new stable, go with a CVS version that looks good or use the most recent
stable release.

4. When I use hosts.deny and .allow I can no longer access Ntop from the
local machine. I've tried different ways of including the local host in
hosts.allow (localhost, actual IP) but with no luck. Help?

5. Two things I need is logging and alerting. Basically I want to create a
database (and graphs) with all the hosts on the network and their usage
based on protocol (http, FTP, mail, total) for the last month or so. The
problem I see with this is keeping the hosts list up to date. Has anyone
done anything like this with any success? Also, I'd like to be passive in
my monitoring, have Ntop alert me when a host is exceeding it's threshold
level for usage of a specific protocol or total bandwidth.

6. Is Ntop what I'm looking for, or is there a better solution? Although I
wasn't really paying much attention the last several months, I did keep a
home subscription to the list. I don't really see a lot of activity and it
makes me wonder if perhaps people have jumped ship?

Thanks everyone.

--
Dan Colquhoun
Information Services
Open Text
519-888-7111 x2482
RE: Questions: some short, some long [ In reply to ]
Found the answer to #4, was using machine IP, not 127.0.0.1. Wow, I should
start drinking coffee...


-----Original Message-----
From: ntop-admin@mixer.unipi.it [mailto:ntop-admin@mixer.unipi.it]On
Behalf Of Dan Colquhoun
Sent: May 8, 2001 2:41 PM
To: Ntop
Subject: [Ntop] Questions: some short, some long


Greetings all,

I'm back to work after a 5 month school break, and have again picked up our
network usage project pretty much where it was left off. I've been playing
around with the CVS version of Ntop from yesterday with limited success
(runtimes of between .5 to 2.5h+ on a ~3Mbit line on a RH 7.1 box before
coredump). I have a few questions:

1. I've noticed that the Thruput is now the Network Load. Has the issue of
kB vs kb in the graph scale been corrected as well?

2. Is there a changelog to go with the CVS daily snapshot that I'm just not
seeing? This would be most handy to get an idea of the bugs fixed/changes
made on a daily basis. A list of open issues would be good for people to
start helping track these bugs down as well.

3. Is there an ETA on the release of the next stable version/snapshot? I'm
looking to deploy Ntop at about 15 sites and am deciding whether to wait for
a new stable, go with a CVS version that looks good or use the most recent
stable release.

4. When I use hosts.deny and .allow I can no longer access Ntop from the
local machine. I've tried different ways of including the local host in
hosts.allow (localhost, actual IP) but with no luck. Help?

5. Two things I need is logging and alerting. Basically I want to create a
database (and graphs) with all the hosts on the network and their usage
based on protocol (http, FTP, mail, total) for the last month or so. The
problem I see with this is keeping the hosts list up to date. Has anyone
done anything like this with any success? Also, I'd like to be passive in
my monitoring, have Ntop alert me when a host is exceeding it's threshold
level for usage of a specific protocol or total bandwidth.

6. Is Ntop what I'm looking for, or is there a better solution? Although I
wasn't really paying much attention the last several months, I did keep a
home subscription to the list. I don't really see a lot of activity and it
makes me wonder if perhaps people have jumped ship?

Thanks everyone.

--
Dan Colquhoun
Information Services
Open Text
519-888-7111 x2482

_______________________________________________
Ntop mailing list
Ntop@listmanager.unipi.it
http://listmanager.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop
RE: Questions: some short, some long [ In reply to ]
> 4. When I use hosts.deny and .allow I can no longer access
> Ntop from the
> local machine. I've tried different ways of including the
> local host in
> hosts.allow (localhost, actual IP) but with no luck. Help?

According to 'man 5 hosts_access':

%h (%H)
The client (server) host name or address, if the host name is
unavailable.


Use %H to allow only local connections (since you are the server) and deny
everything else. I have used this before to allow only locally-spawned
ntalk connections to work.

> 5. Two things I need is logging and alerting. Basically I
> want to create a
> database (and graphs) with all the hosts on the network and
> their usage
> based on protocol (http, FTP, mail, total) for the last month
> or so. The
> problem I see with this is keeping the hosts list up to date.
> Has anyone
> done anything like this with any success? Also, I'd like to
> be passive in
> my monitoring, have Ntop alert me when a host is exceeding
> it's threshold
> level for usage of a specific protocol or total bandwidth.

You might have to have another program sift through ntop's results
periodically and take action if your criteria are met. I don't think ntop
can do what you describe on its own (yet).

> 6. Is Ntop what I'm looking for, or is there a better
> solution? Although I
> wasn't really paying much attention the last several months,
> I did keep a
> home subscription to the list. I don't really see a lot of
> activity and it
> makes me wonder if perhaps people have jumped ship?

Nope. Haven't jumped ship. In my case, I've simply had about a zillion
other research projects to work on, and thus haven't had a lot of time to
spend on ntop, but I'll be getting back to it when other things settle down
a bit (hopefully htis summer).

In the meantime, I know Luca has been working fairly hard on ntop, and
(grin) has been using one of my Linux boxes (Slackware 7.1) as a testbed for
high-bandwidth uses (>50Mb on a line). So development hasn't stopped.
People are just kinda quiet at the moment.

To answer your other question, though, I haven't seen another network
monitoring application (short of some huge monstrosity like Concord Network
Health) that can do what ntop does.

--J
Re: Questions: some short, some long [ In reply to ]
Hi Dan,

Dan Colquhoun wrote:
>
> Greetings all,
>
> I'm back to work after a 5 month school break, and have again picked up our
> network usage project pretty much where it was left off. I've been playing
> around with the CVS version of Ntop from yesterday with limited success
> (runtimes of between .5 to 2.5h+ on a ~3Mbit line on a RH 7.1 box before
> coredump). I have a few questions:
>
> 1. I've noticed that the Thruput is now the Network Load. Has the issue of
> kB vs kb in the graph scale been corrected as well?
it hsould. Check pls.

> 2. Is there a changelog to go with the CVS daily snapshot that I'm just not
> seeing? This would be most handy to get an idea of the bugs fixed/changes
> made on a daily basis. A list of open issues would be good for people to
> start helping track these bugs down as well.
cvs keeps a log of changes.

>
> 3. Is there an ETA on the release of the next stable version/snapshot? I'm
> looking to deploy Ntop at about 15 sites and am deciding whether to wait for
> a new stable, go with a CVS version that looks good or use the most recent
> stable release.
I'm doing my best to fix all the problems I see. ntop 2 has 2 goals:
dynamic hash size and stability. It won't be released 2.0 final until I
hear that there are major issues around.


> 4. When I use hosts.deny and .allow I can no longer access Ntop from the
> local machine. I've tried different ways of including the local host in
> hosts.allow (localhost, actual IP) but with no luck. Help?
Bear in mind thgat ntop supports TCp wrapp if installed.

> 5. Two things I need is logging and alerting. Basically I want to create a
> database (and graphs) with all the hosts on the network and their usage
> based on protocol (http, FTP, mail, total) for the last month or so. The
> problem I see with this is keeping the hosts list up to date. Has anyone
> done anything like this with any success? Also, I'd like to be passive in
> my monitoring, have Ntop alert me when a host is exceeding it's threshold
> level for usage of a specific protocol or total bandwidth.
This is a work in progress. Some students of mire are workign at it.
Would you like to be part of the team?

> 6. Is Ntop what I'm looking for, or is there a better solution? Although I
> wasn't really paying much attention the last several months, I did keep a
> home subscription to the list. I don't really see a lot of activity and it
> makes me wonder if perhaps people have jumped ship?
As far as I can see I'm the only developer. I'm doing my best working at
ntop on my spare time. I told several times that I need somebody who can
help me. So far I've not received anything. That's the point.

> Thanks everyone.
>

Thanks, Luca

> --
> Dan Colquhoun
> Information Services
> Open Text
> 519-888-7111 x2482
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ntop mailing list
> Ntop@listmanager.unipi.it
> http://listmanager.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop

--
Luca Deri NETikos S.p.A.
Via Matteucci 34/B 56124 Pisa, Italy.
Ph. +39/050/968.639 Fax. +39/050/968.626
Email: luca.deri@netikos.com
WWW: http://luca.ntop.org/ ICQ: 68183632
Software is about stuff, about getting hands dirty - Jim Coplien