Sonora Communications, Inc.

These are some installation and configuration notes for using the ntop network monitoring tool on a SME 7 server.  We chose ntop because it gave us the information we wanted, is simple to install and easy to turn on and off.

Installation

If you already have the 'dag' or 'rpmforge' yum repository configured, skip to 'yum install..."

Add the 'rpmforge' (was 'dag') repository: 

rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/packages/rpmforge-release/\ rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm

Edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo file to disable the repo unless specifically enabled.

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

Change: 

enabled = 0

Install ntop:

yum install ntop --enablerepo=rpmforge --enablerepo=base

Note: at least once, I had to manually add the contents of /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo to the /etc/yum.conf file.

Starting and Stopping ntop

chkconfig ntop on

config set ntop service status enabled TCPPort 3000 access private

You may need to run ntop from the command line once as ntop needs you to create an admin password (entered twice).  You may also want to start ntop interactively for troubleshooting.

ntop -u ntop

(ctrl-C to exit)

You should then be able to start and stop ntop with these commands: 

/etc/init.d/ntop start

/etc/init.d/ntop stop

/etc/init.d/ntop restart

If desired, you can start ntop automatically at boot time.  However, you may not want ntop running all of the time to conserve resources.

Using ntop

From the LAN 

ntop provides its own web server which will start up on port 3000 by default:

http://ip.of.ser.ver:3000

From the Internet 

If you are trying to access ntop from outside of your local network (Internet), you can use SSH port forwarding (can also be done with PuTTY on Windows):

ssh -l root -L 3000:localhost:3000 <ip_or_name_of SME_server>

then point your browser to:

http://localhost:3000

There are ways to proxy ntop through the existing Apache web server, but I was unable to make it work on SME 7.  If anyone figures this out, please let me know how and I'll add it to this page of notes.

From a Handheld 

There is a PDA (WAP) plugin available that makes its output available here:

http://ip.of.ser.ver:3000/plugins/PDAPlugin