This is a text-only version of the following page on https://raymii.org: --- Title : ntop-ng 1.1 installation on Ubuntu 12.04 Author : Remy van Elst Date : 29-11-2013 URL : https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/ntop-ng-installation-on-Ubuntu.html Format : Markdown/HTML --- ### Screenshots This is a guide on installing the latest ntop-ng (1.1) on Ubuntu 12.04. ntopng is the next generation version of the original ntop, a network traffic probe that shows the network usage, similar to what the popular top Unix command does. ntop is based on libpcap and it has been written in a portable way in order to virtually run on every Unix platform, MacOSX and on Win32 as well. ntopng users can use a a web browser to navigate through ntop (that acts as a web server) traffic information and get a dump of the network status. In the latter case, ntop can be seen as a simple RMON-like agent with an embedded web interface. This tutorial will walk you through the compilation and installation of ntopng from source. The package in the Ubuntu 12.04 repositories it quite old.

[![ntop][2]][2] [![ntop][3]][3] [![ntop][4]][4] [![ntop][5]][5] [![ntop][6]][6] ### What can ntopng do? * Sort network traffic according to many protocols * Show network traffic and IPv4/v6 active hosts * Store on disk persistent traffic statistics in RRD format * Geolocate hosts * Discover application protocols by leveraging on nDPI, ntops DPI framework. * Characterise HTTP traffic by leveraging on characterisation services provided by block.si. * Show IP traffic distribution among the various protocols * Analyse IP traffic and sort it according to the source/destination * Display IP Traffic Subnet matrix (who is talking to who?) * Report IP protocol usage sorted by protocol type * Act as a NetFlow/sFlow collector for flows generated by routers (e.g. Cisco and Juniper) or switches (e.g. Foundry Networks) when used together with nProbe. * Produce HTML5/AJAX network traffic statistics [More information on ntop-ng can be found on their website: http://www.ntop.org/][7] ### Contents This is what we are going to do: * Install required packages * Download files * Place ntopng-data * Compile ntopng * Create config file * Test ntopng * Place upstart script Here's what you need: * Ubuntu 12.04 installation * Debian 7 also works [This tutorial was tested on a DigitalOcean VPS. If you use this link you sponsor this website. (referral link)][1] ### Note about checkinstall and packages We are using checkinstall here to create a debian package of the source we compile. I do this because it gives more flexibility in managing the software afterwards. Upgrading or uninstalling the packages is easier than removing all the things make install placed. Furthermore, it makes it more clear for other administrators which software is installed. If you for example want to upgrade ntop-ng when it was installed via this tutorial with checkinstall, repeat the tutorial with only the version number changed. ### Installing required packages These are the packages we need to build and use for ntopng apt-get install libpcap-dev libglib2.0-dev libgeoip-dev redis-server wget libxml2-dev build-essential checkinstall ### Download the files We need to download both the data files and the source code. You can download it [from sourceforge][8]: mkdir -p /usr/local/src cd /usr/local/src wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ntop/ntopng/ntopng-data-1.1_6932.tgz" -O ntopng-data-1.1.tar.gz wget "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ntop/ntopng/ntopng-1.1_6932.tgz" -O ntopng-1.1.tar.gz ### Place ntopng-data The data files contain files for the web interface like the GeoIP database. They are already good, the only thing we need to do is place them: cd /usr/local/src tar -xf ntopng-data-1.1.tar.gz cd ntopng-data-1.1_6932 cp -r ./usr/* /usr ### Compile ntopng The compilation of ntopng itself is a bit more work, this is because the ntopng 1.1 package includes prebuilt .o blobs for third party tools, probably by accident, which will cause you trouble when building ntopng yourself. We need to clean those up. First we extract: cd /usr/local/src tar -xf ntopng-1.1.tar.gz cd ntopng-1.1_6932 Then we configure: ./configure Clean up: make clean cd third-party/json-c make clean cd .. cd third-party/LuaJIT-2.0.2 make clean cd .. cd third-party/rrdtool-1.4.7 make clean cd .. cd third-party/zeromq-3.2.3 make clean cd .. cd third-party/credis-0.2.3 make clean cd .. Start the actual compilation: make And install the thing: checkinstall The default answers for checkinstall are okay. ### Creating the ntopng config file First we create the required folder: mkdir -p /etc/ntopng There are two files needed. First is `/etc/ntopng/ntopng.start`: --local-networks "172.20.16.0/24" --interface 1 To see all available interfaces and options, use the `ntopng -h` option: Available interfaces (-i ): 1. eth0 2. vmbr0 3. venet0 [...] 14. any 15. lo Then there is the `/etc/ntopng/ntopng.conf` file: -G=/var/run/ntopng.pid Again, with the `ntopng -` option you can see all the possible options for use in this config file. Before starting the test, make sure redis is started: /etc/init.d/redis-server restart ### Test ntopng If the compilation gave no errors and the config files are places we can start `ntopng` and see how it works: ntopng /etc/ntopng/ntopng.conf Use your web browser to navigate to `http://your-ntop-box-ip:3000`. There you can login with the username/password combo `admin/admin`. If this works, and there is data visible as in the screenshots, continue on to set up the upstart script. ### Upstart script This is a simple upstart script which can be used to start, stop and restart ntopng. Place it in `/etc/init/ntopng.conf`: # ntopng network flow analyzer # by https://raymii.org description "ntopng network flow analyzer" start on virtual-filesystems stop on runlevel [06] respawn respawn limit 5 30 limit nofile 65550 65550 setuid root setgid root console log script exec /usr/local/bin/ntopng /etc/ntopng/ntopng.conf end script [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=7435ae6b8212 [2]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/ntopng/1.png [3]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/ntopng/2.png [4]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/ntopng/3.png [5]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/ntopng/4.png [6]: https://raymii.org/s/inc/img/ntopng/5.png [7]: http://www.ntop.org/ [8]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntop/files/ntopng/ --- License: All the text on this website is free as in freedom unless stated otherwise. This means you can use it in any way you want, you can copy it, change it the way you like and republish it, as long as you release the (modified) content under the same license to give others the same freedoms you've got and place my name and a link to this site with the article as source. This site uses Google Analytics for statistics and Google Adwords for advertisements. You are tracked and Google knows everything about you. Use an adblocker like ublock-origin if you don't want it. All the code on this website is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 license unless already licensed under a license which does not allows this form of licensing or if another license is stated on that page / in that software: This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see . Just to be clear, the information on this website is for meant for educational purposes and you use it at your own risk. I do not take responsibility if you screw something up. Use common sense, do not 'rm -rf /' as root for example. If you have any questions then do not hesitate to contact me. See https://raymii.org/s/static/About.html for details.