ntop

I’ve been playing with ntop, a rather neat way to monitor network traffic. I’ve got it connected to my personal machine at home, and it’s able to monitor all network traffic (of any kind - TCP/IP, raw ethernet, whatever).

It’s pretty neat - it allows me to view all sorta of network related activities. It can even examine the MAC addresses of the ethernet cards on the network, and determine who made the network interface. It has OS detection, service detection. ntop even has geographic location tracking. It’s pretty neat software, and it’s easy to set up on a Linux, OS X, and I imagine any unix-based system. Windows is supported too, but it’s hard to get excited about that.

Another project hosted by the ntop project is ‘n2n’ - a layer two peer-to-peer VPN. I’ll have to research it some; it looks interesting if only from a ‘wow... and you thought you could secure your network’ sort of way. It looks like it is pure evil in its own way...