As announced during the last ntop Webinar, the new nBox UI has been released!
What is nBox UI? nBox UI is a web-based User Interface that simplifies the ntop’s software configurations (ntopng, nProbe, nProbe Cento, n2disk, …), assisting with complex things such as creating configuration files and managing the services and let you focus on playing with the applications. nBox UI also helps you manage the box, with the ability to configure the box connectivity, users, etc. nBox UI is in practice what we use to build our nBox Recorder and nBox NetFlow hardware appliances to let users with no system-admin skills to manage their boxes and the installed ntop’s software.
The old Perl/CGI-based nBox web interface was based on obsolete technologies, was hard to maintain and extend, and was running on the latest Ubuntu LTS only due to some OS dependencies. For this reason, we decided to rewrite it from scratch.
The new nBox UI is based on the Cockpit Project, an Open Source web-based UI for servers sponsored by Red Hat which is becoming the de-facto standard for managing Linux servers using the browser.
nBox UI now runs on most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, and it’s extensible by means of Javascript plugins. The ntop’s nBox UI in short is a package with includes Cockpit (as dependency) and a set of plugins written in modern HTTP and Vue.js.
Similar to the previous nBox software, nBox UI can be used to configure and run the applications, including ntopng, n2disk, nProbe, Cento, monitor them, run traffic extractions from recorded PCAP traces.
In addition to this, it now also features event notifications, that lets you know with a message on your phone (or an email or any other endpoint supported by ntopng) when an application is started, stopped, or there is a failure, just to mention a few examples.
nBox UI can be installed on most Linux distribution using the packages in our repository. Please also take a look at the User’s Guide for further information.
Enjoy!