HOWTO: Network Monitoring with nTop in Ubuntu

ntop is a network probe that shows how much the network is being utilised with very little overhead and impressive graphical representation via the web. Its definitely a must-have tool if you run a fileserver.

The version of ntop on the ubuntu mirrors is 3.2.x, so I set out to update to the latest release this weekend (3.3.x released in June last year).

This install is being done on Ubuntu 7.10 using ntop 3.3.7.

First up lets download the distribution of ntop we’re going to be installing. This is the internode mirror in Australia, but you can find your closest mirror via sourceforge.

wget http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ntop/ntop-3.3.7.tar.gz

Next we need to extract the files to a folder.

tar -xvf ./ntop-3.3.7.tar.gz

Next up lets install/make sure we have all the dependencies we need to build this version.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) librrd2-dev libtool libpcap-dev tcpdump librrd2 rrdtool rrdtool-tcl libgdbm-dev libgdbm3 automake autoconf automake1.7 debhelper gettext html2text intltool-debian libgd2-noxpm-dev libjpeg62-dev libncurses5-dev libssl-dev libwrap0-dev po-debconf

Once the dependencies are installed you can go into the extracted folder and tell it to setup the environment and configure it.

cd ./ntop-3.3.7/
chmod +x ./autogen.sh
./autogen.sh

This will make sure your environment is correctly setup and configure to build the necessary make files. There shouldn’t be any errors at this point as you have installed all the correct dependencies. Next up we need to build the application and install it.

make
sudo make install

Then you can start nTop by running the following command:

sudo ntop -P /usr/local/lib/ntop/

There we have it, browse to http://localhost:3000 and you’ll be running the latest and greatest ntop.