BSDStats v6.0 now available

[Marc Fournier]

Hi …

If you have never heard of it, BSDStats <http://bsdstats.org/> is a sampling of users of the given BSD operating systems that opted to install a data collection program. It is not representative in any way of the total population of users/installations of the given BSD operating systems.

For those security minded (all of us?), this is a completely Anonymous Collector.  When you run it the first time, a KEY/TOKEN pair is generated between the client and the server, and stored in /var/db/bsdstats … that pair is used in all communications, and works perfectly well through PROXY servers, as we DO NOT store / use your hostname or IP at any point.

Over the past several weeks, there has been work done to fix some issues with BSDStats 5.x, with the following bugs fixed:

* Fixed the problem that few last packages in the list were always missing from submission (patch originally developed by Marc)
* Optimization of collection of installed packages information (bug#198650)
* Added TOR port option to submit anonymously (bug#198679)
* Fixed the problem that HTTP_PROXY option didn't work when user/password were required
* Reduced the effect of -nodelay, before it also prevented the submission of package information
* Fixed the problem that port submission also contained the duplicate of device submission
* Added bsdstats-update command to make it easier to run manually
* Made all network submissions done through the single command (nc(1))
* Fixed the bug that 'Run now' feature wasn't working when built from port
* Fixed the problem that failures of package information submission were silently ignored
* Fixed typo
* Made 300.statistics script to have consistent coding style
* Extensive code cleanups in 300.statistics
* Made log file more informative
* Added BSD license

Thanks to Yuri for the work on cleaning it up, and working to update the port, and Gene for testing it on NetBSD.

To update your script, please go to our Instructions Page <http://bsdstats.org/bt/instructions.html> … a Package for FreeBSD is available there (the port in /usr/ports/sysutils/bsdstats is scheduled to be updated over the next week or so) … for NetBSD/OpenBSD users, we have a Bash version that is available … its the same code as the FreeBSD version, but due to an issue with the standard shell, bash is required.

NetBSD / OpenBSD are the only non-FreeBSD systems we’ve been able to get confirmed so far … if someone can confirm BASH vs non-BASH versions on their OS and let me know, I can update the site.

Also, any bugs with the web site, please let me know and we’ll see about getting it fixed.

And, of course, any questions, please feel free to email me.