Eric, thanks for taking your time for contributing to the project. I agree with most of things you stated below. The only point I don't share is the following: this is the first time I hear from you so far. If you experience ntop crashes since 1 year why didn't you bother me and sent me a precise report about how to reproduce the problems? Enclosed you can see a file that shows that ntop's stable for me. Last week one ntop-er, Justin McNutt, told me that ntop was unstable on his network. Since last week I'm taking advantage of one account he kindly created for me on one of his hosts and now ntop doesn't crash anymore after 5 minutes. I don't expect that everyone on the mailing list sends me new code, patches or ideas. What I expect is to help me with ntop. So please feel free to send me error reports. I'm prepared to fix bugs. Stability is the goal of ntop 2.0. You can be sure that I will not release 2.0 final until ntop stays up for 38 days and more as it happens on my workstation. Cheers, Luca Eric Frisch wrote: > > Anthony David wrote: > > > Luca > > > > Now I had time to ponder this a bit more and had a look at my snort > > database after installing snort a few days ago, do you see ntop as a > > complimentary tool or an alternative tool to snort in a short while? > > > > From my viewpoint I don't see the rational of turning Ntop into an intrusion > detection tool when there are other very viable alternatives like Snort out > there. Ntop has turned into a house of cards, way too many features built > on an unstable foundation. No version capable of running for more than a > few minutes has been released in the past year and there are many doubts as > to the accuracy of various traffic statistics. Running an IDS that dies > every five minutes is not of much use. No stable release and no trust adds > up to no use, no matter how pretty it looks and how many features are added. > > At this point I would add by taking away, pull the web interface out and run > the app as a CGI or as a daemon that builds static pages to be served by a > standard web server. Strip the thing down to the basics and make it > bullet-proof. The most useful stuff is the traffic tables and accounting. > Get that right and then tack on the other stuff in a modular and methodical > way such that it can easily be pulled or debugged if it introduces stability > problems. > > Eric -- Luca Deri Telecom Italia IT Via Matteucci 34/B 56124 Pisa, Italy. Ph. +39/050/968.639 Fax. +39/050/968.626 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://luca.ntop.org/ ICQ: 68183632 Software is about stuff, about getting hands dirty - Jim Coplien
