On Mar 11, 2008, at 4:16 PM, Chris Pickel wrote:

On 11 Mar, 2008, at 16:48, Alex Zavatone wrote:
My goal in installing MacPorts was to get a ntop installed.  Checking for installation instructions for ntop on macports.org wasn't helpful at all; I couldn't find any instructions.  Luckily, back at the old darwinports.org there is a url for ntop, http://ntop/darwinports.org that actually contains installation instructions:

Did you mean http://ntop.*.com? That site is not affiliated with MacPorts at all and has been a source of much bad information (you might notice I avoid even writing something that could be construed as a link to it).

Oops.  My mistake.  You are correct.  http://ntop.thatOtherDomain.com/ .

The place that you should have found information would be the [MacPorts guide][1], in section [3.1.8][2]. Where did you look instead? What would have guided you towards this location? (we want to be better at getting people there in the future).

Since I first had to figure out how to install MacPorts on my macs, I opted for a .dmg.  I then had to figure out that I needed xCode since the .dmg doesn't check to see if it is installed and I installed that.  Then after installing it many many times with no luck, I finally found out how to join this list and ask a question, which Adrian kindly answered and I finished up editing the file that I thought the DMG would create, opened terminal and ran the self update.

I then looked on http://www.macports.org for available ports and entered ntop in the entry field.  I found a description of ntop but nothing to help me install it.  I clicked on Downloads under Available Shortcuts and it didn't have ntop info so I resorted to that information that I found prowling around that other site.

Originally, I was instructed from a nice user on Apple's OS X Server email list that I could install MacPorts and then I should visit ntop.*.com to get ntop.  It actually had instructions in reverse text about 1 page down.  So I tried them.  I had no idea that port install was needed, or how it was used or why.  Ignorance is bliss, right?  Riiiight.  And here we are.  

[1] http://guide.macports.org/
[2] http://guide.macports.org/#using.port.install

Thanks so much.  I'll be reading that in a bit.

cd /opt/local/bin/portslocation/dports/ntop
% sudo port install ntop

One problem here is that if /portslocation/dports/ntop doesn't exist, then you must create it, cd to it and then sudo.  Even thou the instructions are clear, they should mention this to save newbies like me.

These instructions are wrong. It should not be necessary to do anything but "sudo port install ntop", as with any MacPorts port.

Ahh, Ok.  So changing the directory is not necessary.  If the .dmg had properly set up my .profile file, the one key missing step, that part would have been a little less confusing to me.  I had to create that on my own as per Adrian's help


Once the directories are created, sudo port install ntop works wonderfully, installing all sorts files - that is until it gets to libcap.  Libcap can't be found in any of the following locations:
---> Fetching libpcap
---> Attempting to fetch libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz from http://www.tcpdump.org/release/
...

It appears that tcpdump.org, the provider of libpcap, is currently inaccessible. If you can find libpcap-0.9.8.tar.gz elsewhere online, dropping it in /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/libpcap will allow you to continue. Otherwise, you'll have to wait for the site to come back up.

Almost.  :]

It's now waiting for a lock on a file.

$ sudo port install ntop
Waiting for lock on /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_net_libpcap/work/.macports.libpcap.state

The contents of that file is the following text:
target: org.macports.main

Thanks so much Chris.

- Alex Zavatone