Is there an ntop virus for Linux?

[Mark Phillips]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Ryan Rix <phrkonaleash at gmail.com> 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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