On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Ryan Rix <phrkonaleash@gmail.com> wrote:

Mark Phillips wrote:
> Whenever I start my Debian Lenny testing laptop a process called ntop starts
> and quickly consumes 99% of my cpu. If I kill the process, nothing happens.
> If I run ntop from the command line, it does what the man page says it does,
> and hardly consumes any resources at all. There is an ntop in /etc/init.d/,
> and when I run /etc/init.s/ntop it consumes very few resources - the script
> calls /usr/sbin/ntop. There are no entries in the /var/log/ntop/access.log
> file.
>
> My questions are:
>
> Do I have a virus masquerading as ntop, and if so how do I remove it? I
> googled "linux ntop virus" and did not come up with anything useful.
>
> Can I just remove ntop from /etc/init.d/ ?
>
> How do I find out if another startup program needs ntop?
>
> Is ntop necessary at startup?
>

Are you monitoring your network usage?
if not, probably safe to remove the /etc/rc.d/ hooks for it for the
runlevel you are booting into.

/etc/rc.d/rc5/XX-ntop <-- look for something like that if you are
booting into runlevel 5 (full desktop)

all in all, removing init.d scripts is a bad idea.

If the init scripts in debian use LSB, the headers will tell you which
(if any) require ntop.

Does ps -aux list any options for ntop when it's run from init?

Ryan

Ryan,

I am not monitoring network usage. This weird behavior just started a week or so ago.

Here is what ps says when I start ntop:

narwhale:/home/mark# ps aux | grep ntop
ntop 10943 4.5 2.6 197824 27136 ? Ssl 09:49 0:00 /usr/sbin/ntop -d -L -u ntop -P /var/lib/ntop --access-log-file /var/log/ntop/access.log -i eth0,eth1 -p /etc/ntop/protocol.list -O /var/log/ntop

I ran grep -nr "ntop" /etc/init.d and all references to ntop are from the ntop script, so I assume none of the other init.d scripts are calling ntop.

Any other thoughts, or should I just disable ntop from init.d:

update-rc.d -f  ntop remove

Mark

P.S. Since I started ntop to check the output from ps, I let it run. And sure enough, after a few minutes, the fan started blowing hard and CPU usage went over 90% for ntop. Now I am really confused....I guess the real question is why do I need ntop to start my laptop?