News

Come to see the new ntopng at CeBIT 2015
As you might have noticed, we are busy working at ntopng. We will soon publish a blog post where we summarise the current activities and what is still missing before the next version of ntopng will be released. However we believe that while communicating through the Internet is a convenient way to reach the ntop community, we still believe that a physical meeting is also desirable. For this reason we thank our long-time partner Wuerth-Phoenix for hosting us at CeBIT Open Source Park where we can demonstrate the new ntopng at work …
Announce

ntop 2015 Roadmap
Like every year, we have made a short-term plan for the first half 2015. As we are a research-oriented company, we plan to tackle open issues or provide better answer to existing ones. This is our short list of activities we are carrying on: 40 Gbit We are in the process of supporting the new Intel X710 and XL710 network adapters. They are able to operate at 10 and 40 Gbit (1 x 40 Gbit or 4 x 10 Gbit). The PF_RING ZC drivers are under development and on the PF_RING SVN …
ntopng

Using ntop Applications with Docker and OpenStack
In order to ease the deployment of our applications, in addition to source code distribution, we have released binary packages (x64 and ARM) for CentOS/RedHat and Ubuntu/Debian. For PF_RING, that requires to be compiled against the installed kernel version, we have moved to DKMS so that you are no longer required to use the same kernel version we use for packaging it. However the current trend is going towards virtualised environments (not just VMs such as VMware) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and thus we need to support them.   Docker …
PF_RING

Accelerating Snort, Bro and Suricata with PF_RING ZC
Over the past few months we have spent quite some time to accelerate popular open-source IDS/IPS with PF_RING ZC. The result is that you now have the option to select your favourite security product as we support all, at no cost, using PF_RING ZC in both IDS and IPS mode. From our benchmarks we have seen that the acceleration with respect to vanilla Linux AF_PACKET is good even using  standard (non ZC) PF_RING. We will provide some test results in the near future, but in the meantime we invite you …
n2disk

Building a (Cheap) 2×10 Gbit (Continuous) Packet Recorder using n2disk and PF_RING
Continuous packet recorders are devices that capture network traffic and save it to disk. The term continuous means that this activity is performed “continuously” until the device is active and not just for a few minutes. At ntop we have developed two companion applications to be used on a packet recorder: n2disk is a software application that captures network at line rate (multi 10 Gbit) and dumps it to disk on pcap format. During packet capture, n2disk can also: Create a pcap index to be used for searching specific packets …
PF_RING

How to Promote Scalability with PF_RING ZC and n2disk
The number of cores per CPU is growing at a rate governed by the Moore’s law. Nowadays even low-end CPUs come with at least 4/8 cores and people want to exploit all of them before buying a new machine. It is not uncommon to see people trying to squeeze on the same machine multiple applications (n2disk, nProbe, Snort, Suricata, etc.) that all need to analyze the same traffic, saving also money for network equipments for traffic mirroring (TAPs, etc.) while reducing complexity. Both PF_RING ZC and n2disk have been designed to …
nProbe

Combining System and Network Visibility using nProbe and Sysdig
Introduction When in 1998 we have started the development of the original ntop, there were many Unix tools for monitoring network traffic: ping, tcpdump, netstat, and many others. Nevertheless we have decided to develop ntop, because there was no tool able to show on a simple way what was happening on our network. Early this year we have started the development of some experimental PF_RING kernel module extensions able to give ntop applications visibility of process activities, this in order to bind network traffic with a process name. We have lived once more the …
nProbe

Introducing nProbe v7
After more than three years of work, we are announcing the release of nProbe v7. This is a major evolution of v6 that many of you used in the bast few years. In essence we have worked a lot for improving the application performance, supporting new protocols (including mobile 3G/LTE network monitoring), adding new information elements and moving towards an accurate probe. nProbe still exports the data in NetFlow/IPFIX but we have opened it to new ways of handling monitoring data (e.g. using Splunk and ElasticSearch). This because today we …
PF_RING

PF_RING 6.0.2 Released: DKMS, Sysdig, Hardware Timestamps and much more
Today we have released a maintenance release of PF_RING that includes many fixes and enhancements. In particular: we have moved our binary packages over DKMS that will make them independent from kernel version that caused you to update whenever a new kernel version was released. Thanks to DKMS this is no longer necessary. We have added sysdig support into PF_RING, so that your PF_RING applications can open the virtual deveice “sysdig” for reading system events without requiring the sysdig library that adds complexity in code development Changelog: PF_RING Library New …
nDPI

Running ntopng and nDPI on MacOSX
On Mac OS X users expect simple tool packaging and installation. Initially we planned to distribute .dmg files containing our apps, but then we have decided that in order to support current and future OSX version more easily, this was not the way to go. For this reason we have added support for packaging systems such as HomeBrew (and soon) MacPorts (work is still ongoing but close to the end). Today if you want to run ntopng and nDPI on your OSX box you have the option to: compile everything by …
nDPI

Released nDPI 1.5.1 and ntopng 1.2.1
Today we have released a maintenance version of both nDPI and ntopng that address minor issues present in the previous stable release. In particular for ntopng we have addressed many small security holes identified by security researchers (our thanks go to Luca Carettoni), and thus we encourage you to upgrade when possible; note that for all these attacks you needed a valid ntopng user and password before to perform them, so their danger level is not too high, but still we encourage you too upgrade. Finally this release contains patches and …
PF_RING

Active vs Passive Polling in Packet Processing
From time to time, PF_RING users ask us whether they should use passive polling techniques (i.e. call pfring_poll()) or use active polling that basically means to implement an active loop until the next packet to process becomes available. All those who have read a programming book or attended university classes, might answer that polling is the answer. This also for various other reasons including energy saving in CPUs.  Unfortunately in practice the story is a bit different. If you want to avoid wasting CPU cycles, when you have nothing to do (i.e. …

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