Re: Is there an ntop virus for Linux?

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Author: Michael Butash
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Is there an ntop virus for Linux?
Not that I know of, and I find it hard to believe ntop would start
default on any distro, especially debian. Must have got in via another
odd dependency. It's typically a standalone app and webserver of its
own for diagnosing tcp/udp application flows from the flag level, not
typically used by most outside of networking folk. I'm not sure it even
offers a direct api for another app to use unless an app is scraping, I
suppose its possible another has it as a dependency.

It usually is stable under low loads, so if it's freaking out, either
its a bad build, you have a lot of broadcast/unicast flooding occurring
that it's seeing, or "normal" traffic of your own its crunching on.
I've killed it with gratuitous bittorrent connections on a slow test
box.

What does it show when you http to:

http://localhost:3000

Should be default port. If you get curious, maybe you should. :)

-mb


On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 11:19 -0700, Mark Phillips wrote:
> No, nothing that I am aware of.
>
> I disabled ntop from init.d, rebooted, and the world did not come to
> an end...;-).
>
> Does VMware or VirtualBox depend on ntop in some way? I have those
> installed for my Windows partition, but I don't use them because my
> po' lil' Pentium IV has a hard time keeping up with both Linux and XP
> at the same time. I also couldn't get USB and network to work with
> them, so my dream of running iTunes on Linux (via VMware/VirtualBox
> and XP) did not come to fruition. Perhaps they installed ntop?
>
> Mark
>
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Bob Elzer <>
> wrote:
>         I agree with Hans, did you turn on any monitoring programs ?
>         Stat gathering, big brother, hobbit, nagios anything of this
>         nature ?

>
>
>
>                 ______________________________________________________
>                 From: 
>                 [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]
>                 On Behalf Of Mark Phillips
>                 Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 9:59 AM
>                 To: Main PLUG discussion list
>                 Subject: Re: Is there an ntop virus for Linux?

>
>
>
>
>
>
>                 On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Ryan Rix
>                 <> wrote:

>
>                         Mark Phillips wrote:
>                         > Whenever I start my Debian Lenny testing
>                         laptop a process called ntop starts
>                         > and quickly consumes 99% of my cpu. If I
>                         kill the process, nothing happens.
>                         > If I run ntop from the command line, it does
>                         what the man page says it does,
>                         > and hardly consumes any resources at all.
>                         There is an ntop in /etc/init.d/,
>                         > and when I run /etc/init.s/ntop it consumes
>                         very few resources - the script
>                         > calls /usr/sbin/ntop. There are no entries
>                         in the /var/log/ntop/access.log
>                         > file.
>                         >
>                         > My questions are:

>                         >
>                         > Do I have a virus masquerading as ntop, and
>                         if so how do I remove it? I
>                         > googled "linux ntop virus" and did not come
>                         up with anything useful.

>                         >
>                         > Can I just remove ntop from /etc/init.d/ ?

>                         >
>                         > How do I find out if another startup program
>                         needs ntop?

>                         >
>                         > Is ntop necessary at startup?

>                         >

>
>
>                         Are you monitoring your network usage?
>                         if not, probably safe to remove the /etc/rc.d/
>                         hooks for it for the
>                         runlevel you are booting into.

>
>                         /etc/rc.d/rc5/XX-ntop <-- look for something
>                         like that if you are
>                         booting into runlevel 5 (full desktop)

>
>                         all in all, removing init.d scripts is a bad
>                         idea.

>
>                         If the init scripts in debian use LSB, the
>                         headers will tell you which
>                         (if any) require ntop.

>
>                         Does ps -aux list any options for ntop when
>                         it's run from init?

>
>                         Ryan

>
>                 Ryan,

>
>                 I am not monitoring network usage. This weird behavior
>                 just started a week or so ago.

>
>                 Here is what ps says when I start ntop:

>
>                 narwhale:/home/mark# ps aux | grep ntop
>                 ntop     10943  4.5  2.6 197824 27136 ?        Ssl
>                 09:49   0:00 /usr/sbin/ntop -d -L -u ntop
>                 -P /var/lib/ntop
>                 --access-log-file /var/log/ntop/access.log -i
>                 eth0,eth1 -p /etc/ntop/protocol.list -O /var/log/ntop

>
>                 I ran grep -nr "ntop" /etc/init.d and all references
>                 to ntop are from the ntop script, so I assume none of
>                 the other init.d scripts are calling ntop.

>
>                 Any other thoughts, or should I just disable ntop from
>                 init.d:
>                 update-rc.d -f  ntop remove 
>                 Mark

>
>                 P.S. Since I started ntop to check the output from ps,
>                 I let it run. And sure enough, after a few minutes,
>                 the fan started blowing hard and CPU usage went over
>                 90% for ntop. Now I am really confused....I guess the
>                 real question is why do I need ntop to start my
>                 laptop?

>
>
>
>
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