Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[User Freebsd]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Nikolas Britton wrote:

>> My shop runs 30+ FreeBSD hosts, and I have several more for personal
>> use. But of those there are maybe 2-3 that I would be ok with listing
>> and exactly zero that I will actually list. It's not that I don't want
>> to help, but I'm not going to run a process like that on a production
>> server.
>> 
>
> What about sending something as simple as uname -mr?

'k ...

>> uname -mr
> 6.1-STABLE i386
>
> The only way this idea will work is if we put some code in the base
> system that sends something generic every few months. for example.
> Send 'uname -mr' to stats.freebsd.org every 3 months. It would be very
> easy to 'opt out', perhaps stats_enable="NO" in rc.conf.
>
> Alternatively we could make it 'opt in' at install time. The installer
> could add stats_enable="YES" to rc.conf when someone answers yes.
>
> The actual code to implement this is trivial, something like a few
> lines of shell script and a config file that lists the next send date.
> This config file can be checked during the monthly periodic and if
> needed trigger the stats script to send the anonymous data and update
> the next send date in the config file. If the stats script can't find
> a path out it should update the next send date and then die.

Why not just have it as part of the monthly_periodic itself ... have it 
send a copy to a central address as well as to the admin itself, with the 
message containing a note on how to disable it in /etc/rc.conf, and have 
it opt_in by default?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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