In my earlier post “a better look at ntop - part 1“, I covered installing ntop, creating the ntop conf file and a few of it’s more interesting configuration options. Today in part 2, we will look at the web interface, plugins and an important command line option. After posting part 1, I thought it would be a good idea to let ntop run for a few days so I could collect some good graphs/data to share. However, it did slip my mind at the time .. ntop is serious resource hog. After 4 days of data collection, the hard drive in my debian box filled up and things were not so happy. Because of this, unfortunately I had to dump all the rrd graphs for those 4 days. But we must press on, with or without pretty graphs!

Let’s dive into a better look at ntop - part 2:

Earlier this morning I read an article that came through my digg rss feed, entitled “Monitor network traffic with ntop“. Basically it went like this .. install ntop (from source) and then type some stuff and you have ntop .. reet! Suffice to say it left me wanting a little more depth. If you want something done right …

I’ve used ntop before in previous jobs, and I have used it on my home network. So today I decided after reading the above linked article, I would setup ntop on my debian box. I will preface this with a short explanation of how I have things setup network wise.

Let’s get ready to nerd it up: