Debian Linux

One of the projects with which I'm involved at work requires me to determine how much bandwidth a streaming IP video product is consuming.  To do so I wanted to run ntop, a protocol analyzer which can present data in nice pretty graphs (important for showing to PHBs).

I've used ntop off and on in the past but one thing that's always been a PITA is installing it.  I first tried installing it on my CentOS 5.2 box but ran into dependency hell.  Next I tried on my Dell Latituded D600, which was a dual-boot XP Pro and OpenSUSE 11 box.  No dice, YAST couldn't find it or rrdtool (a dependency) in the OpenSUSE repositories.  So, I decided to give Debian a try.

I haven't tried plain Debian in years, though I've used derivatives, such as Knoppix and (K)Ubuntu recently.  I am pretty impressed.

To install Debian I downloaded and burned the netinstall image to a DVD (it'll fit on a CD but I didn't have any handy).  The installer recognized all the hardware in my Dell and didn't screw up my XP installation, either.

To get my Intel Pro2200BG wifi NIC running, I had to download firmware, but basic support was already in the 2.6 kernel I'm running.  I'm on an open network and haven't yet tried it on a network with encryption.

Aside from ntop I installed some other network monitoring tools, including nmap, Wireshar, and airsnort, all from Debian's repositories.

So far, so good.  I wish I had tried Debian years ago.