ntop: With special guest star yeahconsole

This is ntop — another of the breed of “console programs” I have on my list that do, in fact, run at the console, but their main product is something graphical.

And just to prove that ntop is indeed running in the background. …

In brief, ntop collects network information and presents it at regular intervals in a web page. It may remind you of darkstat, which technically hasn’t appeared on this blog although it was mentioned in the closing days of the old one.

ntop isn’t difficult to set up, and so long as you can find the IP address of your machine and direct your browser to port 3000, you should be able to get the pretty graphs like above.

I can’t find much fault with ntop; it seems to do what it promises and it was no more difficult to get running than to pick an interface.

On the other hand, to me this really presses hard up against the definition of a console program. I could rationalize things like imagemagick or even mplayer, but this might tiptoe over the line.

And yes, the drop-down tilde-style terminal emulator is yeahconsole. I’ve been experimenting with unobtrusive terminal emulators, just for fun.

For what it’s worth, here’s the relevant portion of my .Xdefaults:

yeahconsole.term:               urxvtc 
yeahconsole.toggleKey:          None+F12
yeahconsole.handleColor:        #D4CFC7
yeahconsole.scrollBar:          false
yeahconsole.font:               xft:mono:antialias=true:size=8
yeahconsole.reverseVideo:       true
yeahconsole.scrollBar:          false
yeahconsole.consoleHeight:      20

I thought yeahconsole would inherit some settings in .Xdefaults that were intended for rxvt-unicode, but I could only get that working the way I wanted by including the same points again, like above. No major issue.