I don't know why I haven't signed up for this list before since we use CentOS all over the place. The list is very useful and it is good for me to participate and "give back" to the community.

Anywho, I wanted to post this response to a thread that was created back in November 2008 about the ntop daemon failing to start. I'm currently setting up ntop as a NetFlow & SFlow collector and came across the issue. A quick refresher, the init script for ntop has an issue where it can't parse the ntop.conf file correctly if switches are entered before the "@/etc/ntop.conf". The suggested work around was to move the "-d -L" switches from in front of the "@/etc/ntop.conf" and put them behind it. This is definitely the fix. There is a caveat to that and I haven't found anyone that has mentioned it so I thought I would. According to the documentation, if you add the switches after the "@/etc/ntop.conf" those will override the configurations in the ntop.conf file. While this isn't an issue with the "-d" option, if you decide to use a custom syslog level and add it to the conf file, the "-L" switch after the conf file will override your custom log facility. In my init file I left the "-d" but removed the "-L" expecting me to put my own syslog entry in the conf file.

____________________________

Matt Ausmus

Network Administrator

Chapman University

635 West Palm Street

Orange, CA 92868

(714)628-2738

mausmus@chapman.edu mailto:mausmus@chapman.edu

"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."

- Churchill's Commentary on Man