NtopNG - usefulness in a home office environment with SG-3100?
-
I've recently upgraded my WAN connection to 1Gbps down / 50Mbps up but ran into issues with the SG-3100 where the CPU was pegging at 92% when I checked speed and it was choking the download speed to less than 500Mbps.
I did a bit of faffing and by stopping the ntopng service I can get line speed with 70-75% CPU load. So it's a choice between ntopng or bandwidth.
There are two users at home, and I mainly went for the upgrade because it was cheap and gave me an increase in uplink speed. Are there any real benefits in this use case for using ntopng?
-
Ntopng would give you insight into type and amount of traffic is used by clients on your network. If its just 2 of you, pretty sure you know what sort of traffic your using. So unless you were looking to troubleshoot something specific and wanted the info, prob little reason to run it 24/7
You could always enable it if looking for some weirdness is what was talking to what, or how much traffic xyz was using, etc..
Just because pfsense has a plethora of packages that can be leveraged, doesn't mean they all need to be running.. Most users would have little use of IPS/IDS - but for some reason they think its a requirement or somehow makes them safer when they really have no clue to the info its showing them or what it actually does, etc..
Do you have bind installed? Bandwidthd, darkstat, haproxy, snort, tinc, etc..
Do you use ntopng regular to check on details of your traffic? If not then no prob have no need to be running it.
-
Hi John,
Thanks for your reply. I only really need it primarily as a DNS black hole which it works well with as well as redundancy for 4G failover and a secondary network for guest access. I thought I'd messed up and couldn't stop NtopNG permanently from the dashboard but got that sorted.
Not really interested in traffic monitoring at the moment but it's useful to know it's there should I need it.
Thanks again!
Best regards,
Richard
