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

[User Freebsd]

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 ...

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




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Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
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