RE: RIPE Region Hostcount for September 2000
Is this loss due to a technical problem or some general changes (named-based vhosting instead of IP-based vhosting)? Or just "fluctuation"?
A cursory examination would indicate a mix of factors. Countries with large drops such as fr (-320407), it (-102268) and pt (-19322) still saw increases in their SOA counts. This could be due, as you say, to more name-based virtual hosting, or to more use of NAT, firewalls/private addresses etc. A few countries saw drops in both hosts and SOA records e.g. ru (-88806 hosts, -20199 domains), hu (-18232 hosts, -978 domains). Here we probably have "fluctuations", as zones, for whatever reason, don't get counted this time. It looks like we're seeing the end of the systematic increase in the number of hosts. However, the trend in the number of domains is monotonically upwards; this is probably a better metric of Internet growth than the host count. Regards. Mike
On Tuesday, 17 Oct 2000, mike.norris@heanet.ie writes:
Is this loss due to a technical problem or some general changes (named-based vhosting instead of IP-based vhosting)? Or just "fluctuation"?
A cursory examination would indicate a mix of factors. Countries with large drops such as fr (-320407), it (-102268) and pt (-19322) still saw increases in their SOA counts. This could be due, as you say, to more name-based virtual hosting, or to more use of NAT, firewalls/private addresses etc.
A few countries saw drops in both hosts and SOA records e.g. ru (-88806 hosts, -20199 domains), hu (-18232 hosts, -978 domains). Here we probably have "fluctuations", as zones, for whatever reason, don't get counted this time.
It looks like we're seeing the end of the systematic increase in the number of hosts. However, the trend in the number of domains is monotonically upwards; this is probably a better metric of Internet growth than the host count.
How about another stats: the number of issued IP addresses by RIPE ? The lower bound of hosts could be derived by hostcounts, the upper bound by IP addresses and some mid range by domain names. IMO IP addresses must be monotonically upwards too. Marcel
Oh, yes. They are very much being used (and at a constantly increasing rate). We have traditinally reported on the IPv4 addresses at RIPE Meetings so we can have a look at how to add those figures to some kind of modified host count that is useful to everyone. Any ideas anyone? Joao At 17:02 +0200 17/10/00, Marcel Schneider wrote:
How about another stats: the number of issued IP addresses by RIPE ? The lower bound of hosts could be derived by hostcounts, the upper bound by IP addresses and some mid range by domain names. IMO IP addresses must be monotonically upwards too.
Marcel
Hi, Daniel Rosen wrote...
The de domain shows the highest increase for September with approximately 35,000 hosts more than in August.
Shouldn't that be .nl?
nl 320304 1947310 529824 1417486 + 54471
Yes, apologies, human-error strikes again. I live in Holland, I should have noticed this :-) * > Is this loss due to a technical problem or some general chang * es * > (named-based vhosting instead of IP-based vhosting)? Or just * > "fluctuation"? Every time I've investigated large drops, they've turned out to be due to one of two things. Either... - an ISP which runs secondary for it's customers from a single DNS server restricted access for one reason or another, thus removing lots of litte-medium size zones from the count all at once or - an ISP or end-user with a large zone restricts AXFR on all it's servers. In this case, the number of hosts for a TLD can drop dramatically, even though the number of zones counted still increases. Simon Leinen wrote...
(2) by moving to a "split" DNS scheme, in which only hosts with external services (in the "DMZ") are listed in the DNS, the internal hosts being in another version of the organisation's zone which is only visible from the inside.
The latter is proably difficult to work around.
The hostcount, despite the name, does not count hosts, it counts A records. Increases in the use of split-DNS, name-based virtual hosting etc have meant that the correspondence between the number of A records and the number of hosts has rapidly decreased. There's not a lot that can be done about this within the framework of the hostcount. However, there are several things that can be done to combat the AXFR-block spread. For instance, when asked, most organsations (ISP's and end-users both) will open up transfers to the collecting machine once it's clear what the purpose of the AXFR is. Unfortunately, most of the resources available for the hostcount have been applied to running the hostcount every month, not much has been left for maintenance and other issues.
Asking for such cooperation would be easier if there was a strict privacy policy for the intermediate data produced by the hostcount software.
We have an AUP for the hostcount data on the RIPE NCC website and only grant access to the data based on signing of this AUP. http://www.ripe.net/hostcount/aup.html Unfortunately, there's a hole in this policy because most local collectors still make the hostcount data publicly available. Coordination of the closure of this hole is part of the maintenance activities of the hostcount for which no time has been available. Regards, Lee Wilmot RIPE NCC
participants (4)
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Joao Luis Silva Damas -
Lee Wilmot -
Marcel Schneider -
mike.norris＠heanet.ie