Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

Quoting Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>:
> Hi,
> 
> elaine from Lunar Linux just stopped by on irc describing how they do
> monitoring of their userbase. I think it could be useful for us too.
> 
> <elaine_> holas, q: you guys still interested in inventory-ing your
> users
> <alley_cat> heya elaine_
> <alley_cat> you mean finding out the number of our users?
> <elaine_> heya ac
> <elaine_> yep
> <alley_cat> i think most of us are interested in that
> <elaine_> ok we have a function in our moonbase download that's been in
> place for abt a year, it hashes the MAC addr of the primary network
> i'face and xmits that to a log
> <elaine_> too many people have dynamic IP's to get any data from IP
> <alley_cat> yeah
> <bascule> and in contrast there are three users behind a NAT router in
> my house
> <elaine_> what we found was a very few users update weekly or less, the
> average user only updates moonbase montly so it takes time to get a
> sense of user counts
> <elaine_> anyhow the code is in our functions i fyou want to lift it
> <alley_cat> definitely sounds interesting
> <ruskie> moonbase???
> <alley_cat> lunars equivalent of sorcery/grimoire
> <elaine_> yea sorry I'm too tired today to switch lingo
> <ruskie> never heard
> <alley_cat> thanks for the tip elaine_, i'll write a mail to our list
> about it
> <elaine_> alley_cat of course there's a server script to gather / log
> the data, I tried doing it the fancy way and reverted to the simple way
> <alley_cat> ruskie: http://sourcemage.org/info/about/history.html
> <elaine_> there was some griping abt 'spyware' but practically if you
> want to know you gotta gather some info
> <alley_cat> i think using a hash of the MAC address should be quite safe
> privacy wise
> <elaine_> alley_cat grep our functions for 'uniq', i fyou want to use it
> I'll get you the server script as well
> <elaine_> alley_cat yes that's what we decided, it's also written to be
> a bit portable

I don't have a problem with that and it'd be nice to know about how often 
people
update their grimoires (so we can have a more reasonable release schedule of
stable) and how many users (roughly) we have.

-sandalle

-- 
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us PGP: 0xA8EFDD61  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/  #196285  |  http://www.shock.wsu.edu/

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