Installing And Configuring ntop

Purpose of ntop

This is a tool to collect network information with simple configurations. Users may use the web browser to access the current network views that include charts and statistics.

Installing ntop

ntop is available on most linux distros. Below are the steps tested on Ubuntu 8.10 Linux. I am sure that ntop is available for RPM based distro like CentOS.

sudo apt-get install ntop
 sudo /etc/init.d/ntop -i eth0 start

Replace eth0 with the network interface name. The system will maintain a database of the network information in the /var/lib/ntop directory. Create the default admin user with;

sudo ntop

Enter the admin user password.

View ntop

The ntop results can be viewed with a web browser pointing to any of the URL address

http://localhost:3000

https://localhost:3001 (this may need to be configured)

The ntop screen should have the following main menus:

• About: What is ntop, credits, documentations and configurations.
• Summary: Traffic, Hosts, Network load, network flows
• All protocols: Traffic, Throughput, Activity
• IP: Summary, Traffic directions, Local
• Utils: Data dump, View log
• Plugins: Lots of plugins to enable or configure
• Admin: Configure, Shutdown

Changing the ntop server startup settings

In the web interface, Select Admin ->Configure ->Startup options

Edit the changes as needed and save.