(Resent - held in mailing list queue since 15Apr, then rejected today)

I'll second the recommendation for more frequent releases, with the caveat
that I'm the one responsible for the confusion.

Luca "owns" ntop and controls the cvs.  He is, however, quite busy balancing
his real job with work on ntop.  Which he uses in his real job, so the lines
are more than a little blurry...

The cvs is NOT a formal release.  It's a daily check in of changes.  These
are captured in the nightly snapshots, but those too aren't formally
releases.

When Luca rolled the internal version # to 2.0.1 from 2.0, I reported that
as "news" and indicated which snapshot contained it.  But that's not a
stable release.

Note that I'm not officially affiliated with ntop - no @ntop.org email
address, etc. (but I'm working on that <grin>, when my new web site goes up,
I'll let you all know).  I don't even have the ability to check fixes into
the cvs.  What I am is a loud and noisy user with some programming skills
and time to monitor the mailing list.

http://snapshot.ntop.org is not officially ntop.  It's a community resource.
Everyone can post FAQ entries.  The only extra "privilege" I have is that
I'm allowed to post "news".  And I do.


Unfortunately, Luca isn't the most communicative individual - he vastly
seems to prefer coding to sending email.  Not that ntop hasn't benefited
from this...  But, for periods of time - when he's swamped - he doesn't
actively monitor the list.  Because I have stepped in, he's felt freer to
focus on the coding - and as a result we've had some huge under-the-covers
rewrites and improvements (-j --border-sniffer-mode is just one example)
since 2.0.

I'm not shy about expressing opinions - I do think Luca should have released
a 2.0.1 version in early January (-j), probably another version mid-Feb
(hash.c rewrite) and one after the security problem in early March.  But he
hasn't and that's his choice - all I can do is lobby.


As part of my development activities, I try to stay fairly close to the
edge, so that it's easier to prep a final diff for a patch, and so that I'm
sure it works...

The result of the combination - infrequent releases, code problems, loud
mouth, frequent postings, very current source - has been that I get asked A
LOT for recommendations about "which version to use", given the known issues
with 2.0 and the instability of the cvs.


>From time to time, I recommend a particular snapshot as being "good", based
on my testing.  These usually are ones where ntop development stabilizes for
a brief period before another spurt of development changes.  These are often
after the inclusion of a new feature, so they're of interest to the
community.


If I've confused you with my recommendations, sorry.  I'll still make them,
however, but I'll try and be more clear that these are personal
recommendations.

-----Burton


PS: To show that I'm *TOTALLY* unrepentant, I'm running a cvs extract from
12Apr2002, which should be equivalent to the 13Apr2002 snapshot
(http://snapshot.ntop.org/tgz/ntop-02-04-13.tgz), which is what I recommend.
This one has fixed the two 100% cpu usage problems and most of the others
I'm aware of...



-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
Florin Andrei
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 12:38 PM
To: Ntop
Subject: Re: [Ntop] RE: NTOP Problems


Guys, i'm aware that you're in the middle of preparing ntop for a new
release, but it would be nice if you made it obvious for us poor
clueless mortals :-) which are the CVS snapshots that are mostly likely
to work well. You know, a tiny note on the CVS releases list, saying
"this release might work better than others" would be enough.
Or pick a few CVS snapshots and christen them as 2.0.2, 2.0.3, etc.
According to the website, the last "stable" release is CVS-2002-02-14.
But on the mailing list, it's 2002-04-04 that's reccomended.
This is somewhat confusing.

Making things obvious would save a great deal of time, especially for
people who are using ntop for the first time.

On Thu, 2002-04-11 at 05:44, Burton M. Strauss III wrote:
> There seems to be a problem with the mailing list, again, sigh...
>
> I'm aware of it an looking into it - at present, I've narrowed it down
(and
> posted a query, which is also held up in the mail queue) to something
> changed between the 4Apr and 5Apr snapshots.
>
> Best answer I can give is to use the 4Apr2002 snapshot for now.  IIRC you
> may have to delete one line in globals-report.c or globals-core.c to make
it
> compile - look for the error message.
>
> -----Burton
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Laurent.d'Aries [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 3:33 AM
> To: 'Burton M. Strauss III'
> Subject: NTOP Problems
>
>
> I'll send this mail 2 times at [EMAIL PROTECTED] but it never appears in the
ML
> ???
>
> Sorry to disturb you with that stupid question, but beginners still
exists.
> I have installed NTOP 2.0.99 build 04/08/02 on a PII400/256Mo running
> Mandrake 8.2 I it also running libpcap-0.7.1, gdbm-1.8.0, nmap 2.53, mySQL
> Everything was compiled without errors, I run ntop -i eth0 -w 3000 -u root
> -d all start, and files grow up in the /usr/local/var/ntop. But I can't
> connect to the localhost:3000 my browser still looking for ...
>
> What can I do ?
>
> Regard,
>
> Laurent
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Laurent d'Aries                                          Micro Research
> IT & Security Expert                              Rue Marie-Henriette 6
> Project Manager                                   B-5000 Namur
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]            Phone (32)81-72 36 80
> http://www.microresearch.be                       Fax   (32)81-74 36 87
>             ________________ Micro RESEARCH ________________
>                 Your partner in TMN and IT architectures
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ntop mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://listmanager.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop
--
Florin Andrei

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

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