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

[Nikolas Britton]

On 7/31/06, User Freebsd <freebsd at hub.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, Svein Halvor Halvorsen wrote:
>
> > Colin Percival wrote:
> >> There are still a lot of people (particularly on pre-6.0 systems) who
> >> are using CVSup rather than portsnap for updating their ports trees.
> >
> > Also, I would guess that some people who run multiple FreeBSD systems,
> > use some sort of local propagation of either the entire ports tree, or
> > locally compiled packages.
> >
> > I work as a sysadmin at the students computer lab at the mathematics
> > department at the Norwegian university of science and technology, and we
> > take this approach. Not that the maths department is a large one, but we
> > have fifty-some workstations and a couple of servers running FreeBSD.
> > Only one or two of which would show up in the portsnap stats.
>
> Ya, that is the part that throws the #s out completely ... its those
> 'ghost machines' that would be nice to see counted somehow ...
>
> How about something as innoculous as:
>
> fetch http://statsserver.domain/aliveping.php?version=`uname -mr`&hostname=`hostname`
>
> run as part of periodic daily ... ?  uname -mr would have to be properly
> formatted for a URL, but that would give a distinct IP / hostname for
> indexing, and OS version, take neglible bandwidth to run, and, I believe,
> doesn't give out any *sensitive* information ...
>

DAILY! Are you out of your mind? and we don't need to collect
hostnames. Can we just start with something simple like:
  'uname -mr | nc statistics.freebsd.org port'
 in the monthly periodic.

On the server side you can make some custom program to collect these
and the ip address (not that it's needed). This will work in the mean
time: 'nc -klo port >> statistics_data_file'


> Then have a daily_statistics_enable="YES" in /etc/defaults/perodic.conf,
> so that ppl can opt out of it ...
>



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