Installing ntop – Debian Squeeze

12/07/2011 by doncicuto

Hi again!
Today I’m going to talk about ntop and how to install the latest stable version in Debian Squeeze.

Ntop is an extraordinary tool that helps you to know more about your network traffic. Luca Deri’s tool has a lot of features and I use it mainly to know quickly what kind of traffic is being generated in my network thanks to its web interface with summaries and rrd charts.

Years ago I used it to identify SQL Slammer worm and since then this tool is in my arsenal to analyze weird network behaviour.

Ok. In case you didn’t notice I love configure and make but ntop is so popular that you can find ntop in the backports repository:

  1. Add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: debhttp://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main
  2. apt-get update
  3. apt-get install ntop
  4. Type the admin user password for ntop’s web interface
  5. Ntop will be started.
  6. Open a browser and go to http://x.x.x.x:3000 where x.x.x.x is the ip address of the host where ntop is installed.. of course!
  7. Debian will install a ntop init.d service, so if you want to stop ntop: /etc/init.d/ntop stop

Ok!. If you want to use the latest stable version … yes configure and make !!:

  1. apt-get install build-essential libtool automake autoconf libpcap-dev libgdbm-dev zlib1g-dev rrdtool librrd-dev libssl-dev python-dev libgeoip-dev graphviz libgraphviz-dev
  2. cd /opt
  3. Download ntop (e.g wgethttp://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/ntop/ntop/Stable/ntop-4.1.0.tar.gz )
  4. tar xfz ntop-4.1.0.tar.gz
  5. cd ntop-4.1.0/
  6. ./autogen.sh
  7. make
  8. make install
  9. ldconfig – So libraries can be found (Thanks Garrie!)
  10. You’ll find ntop files in /usr/local according to ./configure:Data files are in     /usr/local/share/ntop
    Config files are in   /usr/local/etc/ntop
    Run directory is      /usr/local/var/ntop
    Plugin files are in   /usr/local/lib/ntop/plugins
    Database files are in /usr/local/var/ntop
    Libraries have been installed in: /usr/local/lib
  11. chown -R nobody:nogroup /usr/local/var/ntop
  12. Ok now from the command line run: ntop
  13. Ntop will ask you for the admin passwordntop startup – waiting for user response!Please enter the password for the admin user:
    Please enter the password again:
  14. Access to http://x.x.x.x:3000
  15. Nice charts!
  16. Use Ctrl-C from the command line to stop ntop.


REF: http://diatel.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/installing-ntop-debian-squeeze/