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, Xiao-Yong Jin wrote:
>
> > Chris Whitehouse <chris at childeric.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
> >
> >> Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
> >>> Counting portsnap and cvsup accesses is non-intrusive - i.e. nothing
> >>> sent from local host - will count systems from any version of
> >>> FreeBSD, but will never count everything because sites with multiple
> >>> hosts may easily have local propagation mechanisms.  But you will
> >>> get an order of magnitude.  However, how do you deal with systems
> >>> with variable IPs?  I don't know enough about the internals of
> >>> either portsnap or cvsup to know if there is some kind of unique id
> >>> associated with hosts.  If not, then you'd wildly over count for
> >>> many home-based, variable IP systems.
> >>
> >> Maybe not so many, my non-static ip hasn't changed since I signed up 3
> >> years ago despite turning off the modem for the odd day or
> >> two. Another network I look after also hasn't changed in a year.
> >>
> > But one can't rely on that.  You'll definitely see more than one ip
> > associated with my laptop, if I move it around.
> >
> > A more reliable way that I can think of is generating a unique ID
> > number when a system finishes installation or upon the first boot.
> > However, it may involve some additional privacy problem.  What do you
> > think?
>
> How does Solaris generate its 'hostid'?  Is it a hardware/sparc thing, or
> software?
>

Generating a unique anonymous key is easy, proving why we need it is not.

Ok, here it is, " ifconfig | sha256 | md5 ". 16^32 unique anonymous
keys. Every host needs to have a NIC to send results so all ifconfig
outputs will be different. Now... What does this solve and why do we
need to add 32 extra bytes?

(20 + 32) bytes * (10^7) = 495.910645 megabytes. The FreeBSD team
would need a 6.6Mbit/s uplink to handle peak load assuming 50% of the
hosts are set to UTC/GMT time and all trigger within 5 minutes of each
other.... I'm not going to pay for that connection.

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