Building NTOP 5.x on CentOS 5.x

Quick and dirty blog post for those people who are looking to get recent versions of ntop (5.x) running on CentOS 5.6. The main problem is that newer versions of ntop require Python 2.6 or later, and this requirement cannot be disabled compile-time. So the best solution is to simply build your own version of Python and install it.

This is all I had to do to get it working:

1. Download a newer version of the Python source (I chose 2.7.3 but anything recent should work).
2. Unzip/tar your python archive.
3. cd python-$version
4. export CFLAGS='-fPIC'
5. ./configure
6. make
7. sudo make install

You don't want to do a make altinstall or add an executable prefix as suggested in other places on the net. The ntop autogen.sh script simply won't detect those types of installs. You'd mainly do that to do a safe "side-by-side" install so that the RedHat/CentOS stuff (like yum) doesn't break with the new version of Python. That advice is outdated, and the Python guys now handle it automatically in the configure/make scripts. Python 2.7 gets installed as python2.7 in the system directory without anything fancy.

You do need the CFLAGS step in order to build Python modules that ntop can link against. Everything else with the ntop install is pretty straightforward in terms of solving dependencies. Happy netflowing!