BSDStats v4.0: Attempt to address some major issues ...

[Marc G. Fournier]

As painful as it was to do, I backed up the old data tonight and wiped out 
the stats ... for one major reason: the stats lost their accuracy.

As several have noticed, the OpenBSD numbers have been increasing quite 
steadily, but looking at the RAW urls coming in, 99% of those #s were from 
a couple of IPs, and they were submitting the full range of releases and 
architectures ...

Unfortunately, since we store neither IP or hostname, trying to 
'surgically remove' the false entries proved to be very difficult ...

I've have just committed BSDstats 4.0 to CVS, and there is a copy of it 
available at http://www.bsdstats.org/downloads/300.statistics ... download 
and replace the one you are currently running, as it will not work anymore 
... the new version even knows to remove your /var/db/bsdstats file, since 
its format is no longer valid either ...

I've increased the size of the IDTOKEN to 32 from 16, since I've been 
noticing alot of duplicates when two hosts submit at close to the same 
time ...

I've also added an 'enable/disable' record before/after submitting the 
reports ...

And, when reporting, both your TOKEN *and* KEY are sent, instead of just 
the KEY ... that way we not only check what we returned to you the first 
time, but also what you sent to us ...

This version also has a 'Network Connectivity' check, in the form of 
checking a TXT record in DNS, so that if the Network is down, it doesn't 
bother going through the whole procedure ...

And, finally, I've made 'checkin_server' configurable, so that you don't 
have to modify the script itself to change that value ... default being, 
of course, bsdstats.org ... Antony is working on docs for how to use 
Apache as a 'quick-n-dirty proxy server', which he'll put up onto the web 
site as soon as completed ...

As I said, you just need to download the new version and run it, you don't 
have to wait for the port to go through, assuming you have already 
installed from the port and /etc/periodic.conf is setup ...

Make sure you run it right after downloading though ...

If anyone out there can see a flaw in the script ... or something that I 
may have overlooked as far as a 'loophole' that could be used to screw 
around with the data, please let me know ... I know its not possible, 
minus registration, to get rid of all holes, but, hopefully I've now 
gotten rid of the ones that a truck could (and did) drive though ...



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Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
Yahoo . yscrappy               Skype: hub.org        ICQ . 7615664