If you're new to Linux, I would definitely stay away from Gentoo in favor of a 'server' install of SuSE or Mandrake.
I found the installation guides @ gentoo.org to be well written and quite easy to follow. But I'll admit it's not my 1st Linux installation, nor even the hardest (LFS 3.0pre3). And not my 1st kernel compile, so I did know which options I wanted to set. Since I don't run much else on these boxes, the post install configuration wasn't that painful. Obviously, YMMV when it comes to Gentoo. I use it on Roo, my firewall (Celeron 533Mhz) and have a Gentoo partition on Owl (my ntop test box) - P3 600EB. It took quite a while to build on Roo, not so long on Gentoo (with their 2x difference in memory speeds there's a huge difference in 'power' between the two, despite the similar core cpu speeds). Keeping with the minimalist ntop-only theme, disable all servers on the host except ssh. You don't NEED nor WANT inetd, apache, ftp, or any of the other crud they insist on installing for a minimal install. Once you've got this minimal OS running, all you need to add are the usuals - gdbm, gd (which requires libpng and libjpeg), and libpcap. Watch out for prebuilt packages of gd - many of them use freetype which then includes a large portion of XFree86. Whereas building gd from source on a system that doesn't have freetype installed builds a non-freetype version of gd. For example, here's what's running (non Kernel threads) on tigger: PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 1622 ? SL 0:01 ntpd -U ntp -g 1632 ? S 0:00 gpm -t imps2 -m /dev/mouse 1641 ? S 0:00 crond 1664 ? S 0:00 xfs -droppriv -daemon 1734 ? S 0:28 /usr/bin/ntop -i eth0,eth1,eth2 @/etc/ntop.conf -d --use-syslog local3 1752 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/atd 1762 ? S 0:00 rhnsd --interval 240 1769 tty2 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty2 1770 tty3 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty3 1771 tty4 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty4 1772 tty5 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty5 1773 tty6 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty6 2039 ? S 0:01 syslogd -m 0 2043 ? S 0:00 klogd -x 2498 ? S 0:00 /sbin/dhclient -1 -q -lf /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient-eth0.leases -pf /var/run/ 2639 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd 4624 ? S 0:00 \_ /usr/sbin/sshd 4626 ? S 0:00 \_ /usr/sbin/sshd 4627 pts/0 S 0:00 \_ -bash 4688 pts/0 R 0:00 \_ ps axf 2743 tty1 S 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty1 ntpd because I like an accurate clock, rhnsd is the RedHat network update program. gpm and xfs I could kill. atd and crond are pretty much required on an RH system. dhclient is for the WAN interface. But as you can see this is pretty minimal and ntop only. It's a RH system and Tigger is my main development machine, so there's a lot of development software installed. It totals 500 rpm's - so I won't post the list. Point is you can take pretty much any other distro and strip it down to run ntop. Just takes work. -----Burton > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chris > K Ellsworth > Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 2:22 AM > To: Ntop General Mailing List > Subject: Re: [Ntop] Recommended stable OS platform for Ntop? --gentoo > > > Being 1 that uses gen2 in their production servers, it does take > knowedge of > linux to setup and time depending on speed of your system it can take 24 > hours to just get the basic system up and working, if it is your > first linux > to play with b4wared there are no fancy guis to be used > > the most current version that someone made an ebuild for is 2.2c which is > the most current stablelisted on sf.net which was ebuilt and put out on 26 > sep 2003 > mholzer at gentoo dot org > and > todd at gentoo dot org > > are the two people that have done the most recent modifications to the > ebuilds for ntop, you might want to check out the mailing list or > the forums > to see what other people have had on ntop success. > > personally i would say the most time is configureing gentoo, ntop > should be > pritty easy to install and configure as long as you read the back traffic, > faqs and the ntop web sites, and same goes for gentoo > > my personal experince has never gone 2 well with it on gentoo but that is > probably for my lack of putting my full effort towards it and my own > ignorace of linux, however a friend and fellow gentoo user has suceeded on > making it work out of the box. > > > good luck > chris _______________________________________________ Ntop mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listgateway.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop
