ntop - network monitoring coolness

So this I've talked a lot in this blog so far about BDD/MD simply because that's the project I've been working on lately.  However, I'm a huge open source fan and you'll probably hear more and more about my open source favorites as time goes on.  Well, I finally got ntop (www.ntop.org) working on Ubuntu 8.04 the other day and man it is cool.  I haven't looked at this product in a few years but it's really a good tool.  Wanna catch file sharing, music download, porno watching network hoggers?!?!  ntop can do that for you.

Installing on Ubuntu takes a little effort because you won't see it in Add/Remove programs. I used apt-get to pull mine down.  It went something like this:

apt-get install ntop

Then I just run ntop from the command line and it comes up.  It defaults to port 3000 so to see the web interface on the same box open FireFox and go to http://localhost:3000   I had to reconfigure it for my second nic (because I have a regular nic and a monitoring nic) so once it was up I went through the web interface to Admin->Configure->Preferences and set the item called ntop.devices to eth1.  Then I did a Admin->Shutdown, waited 30 seconds and restarted it from the command line.  Good stuff.