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

User Freebsd freebsd at hub.org
Mon Jul 31 17:49:26 UTC 2006


On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, Alex Zbyslaw wrote:

> But this will then only count from the first version(s) of FreeBSD which 
> contain the periodic job.  Then every machine running an earlier release 
> would be a ghost.

Agreed, but any "active" counting will fail dealing with older machines, 
regardless ... this is something that should have been implemented / 
started *ages* ago ... we will never have "# of sales figures" we can 
market ourselves to vendors based on, but, we also have nothing in the way 
of "# of deployments" figures ...

> I think the bottom line I see is that whatever you do, you cannot count 
> everything.  *If* some kind of counting could be done *now* using 
> portsnap and cvsup servers that are amenable, then you reasonably 
> quickly start getting some kind of count.

cvsup, i don't believe, will give us any #s, mainly since it doesn't seem 
to really provide any information:

# grep 68851 /var/log/cvsup
Apr 29 23:15:08 postgresql cvsupd[68851]: +4338 ?@184.word-to-the-wise.com (turbine.word-to-the-wise.com) [SNAP_16_1h/17.0]
Apr 29 23:15:13 postgresql cvsupd[68851]: =4338 [96Kin+3Kout] pgsql/cvs
Apr 29 23:15:13 postgresql cvsupd[68851]: -4338 [97Kin+3Kout] Finished successfully

> The some kind of optional periodic job can also be rolled out and many 
> months down the line it would start to produce potentially more reliable 
> (i.e. higher :-)) figures, assuming ppl were amenable to running it. 
> But if you have to wait for 6.3 or 7.0 or whatever, and then wait for 
> the majority to adopt it, that's longer than I think you want to wait 
> for some kind of answer.

... true, but if we *never* do anything, we'll never have numbers ... even 
if there is a 12 month or more adoption curve, that adoption period has to 
start *somewhere* ...

As far as ppl amenable to running it ... if the purpose was properly 
explained, with periodic reminders on the lists as to what the "Stats 
Project" was all about, and as long as the information being sent out is 
fully explain (ie. make sure ppl realize that nothing of a sensitive 
nature is being sent out), I think adoption would be alot easier ...

----
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


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