December 19, 2008

Installing ntop on Mac OS X 10.5.x, Leopard

First off, install MacPorts, with some additional instructions here.

Then open up the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type:

sudo port install ntop

Notice: It will take a LONG time even on good hardware (about 10 minutes on my Mac Pro with a striped RAID boot array).

After that is complete, you can then launch it by running:

sudo ntop -d

which launches it in daemon mode so that you can close your terminal and still have it running in the background.

It should prompt you to enter the admin password, which has to be 5 characters or more. Type it again to confirm, and it should launch.

Notice that if you do not run it with sudo, you may receive this message:

mac-pro:~ ryebread$ ntop
Fri Dec 19 10:57:15 2008  NOTE: Interface merge enabled by default
Fri Dec 19 10:57:15 2008  Initializing gdbm databases
Fri Dec 19 10:57:15 2008  **ERROR** ....open of /opt/local/var/ntop/prefsCache.db failed: File open error
Fri Dec 19 10:57:15 2008  Possible solution: please use '-P '
Fri Dec 19 10:57:15 2008  **FATAL_ERROR** GDBM open failed, ntop shutting down...
Fri Dec 19 10:57:15 2008  CLEANUP[t2687149856]: ntop caught signal 2 [state=2]
Fri Dec 19 10:57:15 2008  ntop is now quitting...

It’s just telling you that it does not have the proper permissions to run in the /opt/local/var/ntop/prefsCache.db database.

Go to a web browser, and type:

http://localhost:3000

and you should be able to see an interface something like the following:

ntop running on Mac OS X 10.5.6, Leopard

ntop running on Mac OS X 10.5.6, Leopard

December 10, 2008

The All-New WebKit Inspector

http://webkit.org/blog/197/web-inspector-redesign/

Check out the latest builds of the WebKit project for a cool new way of debugging your HTML/CSS/JavaScript woes.

October 3, 2008

Connecting to the Remote Windows Console with Mac’s RDP Client

Ever needed to connect to the remote console of the machine rather than running through a terminal services session so that you could install certain software, or reset stuck terminal services sessions from a remote location? All you have to do is type /console behind the host in the window.

Remote Desktop Connecting to Console