Just an FYI, the RealTek units have a bit of a rep as crap.  Now that's not
been my experience - I've used them without problems.  But I do know that
there were some ugly things WRT the drivers (see How this driver differs
from the 2.4 "8139too.c" at http://www.scyld.com/network/rtl8139.html)...

"3 : Is anyone running ntop successfully with 2 or more NICs binded ?" -
that may be the key.

I've never heard of anyone using it with ntop (there's really no point -
from ntop's perspective - you only bind interfaces to get more throughput),
and frankly I have no clue how libpcap will present the data, but I have a
guess or two...

One is that ntop may be seeing the same packets from BOTH interfaces.

The second is that the two (or more) interfaces bound together may retain
their separate MAC addresses.  This only matters on the local collision
domain, but would affect the packets ntop sees originating from the
firewall/ntop box and also those directed to it.  A lot of ntop uses the MAC
address, so you could well be causing problems deep inside...  If you have
access to that configuration, try the -j | --border-sniffer-mode switch - it
suppresses much of that at the cost of degraded functionality.

The only way to be sure would be to run tcpdump and capture some part of the
stream into a file, then feed that into ntop.   If you got lucky with a
small file that crashes ntop, then we could figure it out.  But even a small
capture should show the packet doubling and the MAC addresses used, if those
are even part of the problem.


-----Burton



-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Shaf
Ali
Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2002 1:24 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Ntop] A reason for dying


Excellent - good pointers... Think we are a lot closer now.

Production Machine {Reboot issue}
---------------------
1 : I never had any core dumps or kernel panics and there was nothing in
syslog :(
2 : I just can't remember the config strip in detail but you may be right
with respect to NIC drivers because if memory serves me right... when I cut
the kernel back by removing unnessary stuff like sensors etc. I feel that I
left ans.o in there which could have possibly caused the problems(reboot
issue) I was having at that time with ntop and so I stopped ntop. Let me
explain ans.o(Intel driver) is an ugly beast which performs adaptive load
balancing over 2 or more nics by believe it or not broadcasting on the local
subnet. A week later I stripped ans.o out also because it was broadcasting
erratically and just used Intel's driver.
3 : Is anyone running ntop sucessfully with 2 or more NICs binded ?

<snip />

Shaf

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