It must have been seeing packets. Because it all worked fine, the network graphs etc. Except that it wasn't resolving ips on that one subnet till I switched interfaces, and specified it explicitly on the command line. It would even show them as hosts, just not resolve their addresses. (Which i verified was possible on the command line.) And I'm in bridging mode on 2.6.x.

Burton M. Strauss III wrote:

I wonder if ntop is even seeing the packets in bridge mode.  IIRC this
depends on the bridge code - there are different versions (some patches to
the 2.2 kernel, some user space, native code in 2.4/2.6, etc.) (And that's
just Linux).

Your specific situation sounds like ntop can't resolve those IPs.  Remember,
at the end of the day all it does is sniff other's responses or use the
standard gethostbyaddr() call, which uses whatever's defined on the host
ntop is running on.

The way to test this is to use nslookup (dig, host, etc.) on the ntop host
and see what it can and can't resolve.  ntop may do a little better because
of the sniff, it shouldn't do worse.

-----Burton




-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Sha
Chancellor
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2004 9:43 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Ntop] Yet another DNS question....


I also deleted addressQueue.db and dnsCache.db, restarted ntop. However.. I have two subnets, and linux is in bridging mode with an ip address assigned to the br0 interface. So i specify the other subnet not on the interface. When i looked at the hosts page again, the domain names for the local subnet NOT on the br0 interface( the one specified on the command line) were there. However, the domain names for the local subnet on the interface were not showing. Just ips instead.

With this in mind,  since my bridge is only 2 ethernet cards i decided
to try deleting those db files and trying to put it on one of the other
interfaces.   When I restarted, now it works.   However, it also worked
on br0 before i did --track-local-hosts

But I'm happy, it works, all is well :)  But it seems to me there's
some strange behavior there.


On Mar 11, 2004, at 7:22 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:




Burton, thanks for the reply.  I did a couple of things this morning
to try
and pin this down:

- I deleted the addressQueue.db and the dnsCache.db files.
- Built a bind server local to the Linux box and updated my
/etc/resolv.conf to point at 127.0.0.1
- Configured the BIND server to be secondary for all reverse zones in
my
building, 15 of them.

This seems to have solved the problem.  It apparently was related to
the
time it was taking to do the name lookups??



--

J. Eric Josephson
Director of Network and System Operations
978-720-2159
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]




"Burton M. Strauss III" To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: rt.com> Subject: RE: [Ntop] Yet another DNS question.... Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] it


03/10/2004 08:02 PM Please respond to ntop






No beating, just...


Remember DNS resolution is a three layer process... see
resolveAddress() in
address.c -   This runs in an async thread, handling the queue.

1. If it's in the cache (dnsCache.db), that value is used.  Cached
entries
have a TTL that is unique to ntop - CONST_DNSCACHE_LIFETIME in
globals-defines.h.  Default is 24*3600 seconds or 24 hours.

2. If it's not cached, ntop uses the host's gethostbyaddr() calls
(these
will hit the /etc/hosts file, DNS server, whatever - same as nslookup).
That's it.


Now sniffing runs separately and loads the cache with data from the responses to other peoples queries.


So dnsCache.db becomes a pretty good cache over time.


However, a negative reply - even a transient one - will stick around
for
the
LIFETIME period.


All of this is EXPLICITLY counted in the info.html and textinfo.html reports:

Address Resolution

DNS Sniffed:

DNS Packets sniffed.....0
 less 'requests'.....0
 less 'failed'.....0
 less 'reverse dns' (in-addr.arpa).....0
DNS Packets processed.....0
Stored in cache (includes aliases).....0


IP to name - ipaddr2str():


Total calls.....48
....OK.....0
....Total not found.....48
........Not found in cache.....44
........Too old in cache.....3


Queued - dequeueAddress():


Total Queued.....14
Not queued (duplicate).....34
Maximum Queued.....7
Current Queue.....4


Resolved - resolveAddress():


Addresses to resolve.....11
....less 'Error: No cache database'.....0
....less 'Found in ntop cache'.....0
Gives: # gethost (DNS lookup) calls.....11


DNS Lookup Calls:


DNS resolution attempts.....11
....Success: Resolved.....8
....Failed.....2
........HOST_NOT_FOUND.....2
........NO_DATA.....0
........NO_RECOVERY.....0
........TRY_AGAIN (don't store).....0
........Other error (don't store).....0
DNS lookups stored in cache.....10
Host addresses kept numeric.....2


That's the FIRST place you have to start to figure out what's going on.



But somehow, everytime I ask anyone for this information, they're never heard from again...


-----Burton






-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 11:42 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Ntop] Yet another DNS question....



OK, I'm ready to take my mailing list beating...

I looked through the old list postings and found similar
questions and some
answers, but could not spot the information I was looking for.

In my implementation of NTOP, I am watching all traffic going out of
our
corporate firewall. NTOP seems to capture most DNS requests that


traverse


the firewall. That is working fine. What I'm having a problem with
is
that I have hundreds of internal machines that generate traffic to the
external world, but have no cause to have their own IP address
resolved


by


any traffic I can sniff.

I am starting NTOP with the following:

ntop -d -u ntop -i eth0,eth1 -M -o -m 10.0.0.0/8 -p
/etc/protocols.ntop


-P


/tmp

and have all of my subnets broken down into 24 bit masks. i.e
10.12.54.x,
10.12.44.x etc...

I am using today's CVS pull, but have had this "problem" for a very
long
time.

I there a way I can specify what address to aggressively do reverse
name
resolution on or simply to have NTOP actively resolve all IP
addresses,
thus more completely populating my internal machine addresses with
names?

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