Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Monitoring your network and servers

November 29th, 2009 by Niels Horn in , , , , ,

I've been busy over the last few weeks evaluating some software to monitor servers, network utilization, etc. I have tested several programs and ended up using three: , , and .

All of these are free & open software. For nagios and cacti you can download SlackBuild scripts from maintained by me. For cacti, if you prefer a complete package, you can download one for Slackware .

For ntop, I adapted a SlackBuild originally written by Michiel van Wessem to install the newer 3.3.10 version. The ntop authors decided to automatically download & install some dependencies (Lua + GeoIP), even if you already have those installed. Since this is a very bad idea (they install it the way they like, while with Slackware YOU are supposed to be in control), I adapted their 'configure.in' and 'Makefile.am' scripts to simply check if those programs are installed and exit if they are not.
Then you can install them the way you like (and following the normal standards) and install ntop afterwards.

With Michiel's permission, I submitted a new SlackBuild script for ntop so SlackBuilds.org that is currently in the pending queue.

Over the next few days / weeks I hope to have some time to elaborate on these three packages and write some hints on how to install and configure them.