Category Archives: opensource

General information on usage of Open Source software, how the proprietary guys lie about it, and how popular it is.

Apache holding strong, IIS declining

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According to the latest (June 2009) NetCraft web server survey, the Free/Open Source Apache web server is now hosting 50.46% of all active web sites surveyed (about 38 Million). Microsoft’s IIS server is at 28.05% (or about 29 Million) – a 7.64% decline from IIS’s May 2009 statistics. Interestingly, Google holds 12.2%, presumably most of that is their own content or content generated by their applications.

This is nothing new – both Free/Open Source software and Unix-related stuff has always had a stronger share in the server (and Internet) market than Microsoft products. And, despite all of Microsoft’s FUD, it’s clear that Apache is still more popular than IIS by a large margin – probably in no small part due to the extendability and scalability of Apache, and its security record (just take a look at the difference in system calls).

The real shining example, however, comes from looking at the stats on the Internet’s million busiest sites – 66.26% running Apache and only 18.77% running IIS, which has been constant for the better part of the last year. That says quite a bit about the stability and scalability of Apache. Not to mention that a lot of the really big sites run their own custom-modified versions of Apache which may or may not be identified as Apache in a survey.

DNS – Open Source rules

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DNS is arguably one of the most important services on the Internet. Without it, every domain name and email address we know would be meaningless. We’d be thrown back into the days of IP addresses without corresponding names. And, given everything that depends on DNS, it’s also one of the most important services from a security standpoint. Compromised DNS servers could cause end-of-the-world havoc for whatever zones they control.

So here’s a fact that Microsoft and the other proprietary guys don’t want you to know: 58.65% of DNS servers that are listed as being authoritative for .com or .net domains are running the free/open source ISC BIND. Less than 0.3% are using a Microsoft product. To me, that says something.

This is according to the October 2008 measurement factory DNS server survey of 99+ Million addresses (618,000+ hosts).

OpenSuSE Internet2 Mirror

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I just bought a “new” desktop – I was thinking of doing an insane AMD Phenom II x4 940 (quad-core 3.0GHz) box – but I happened to find a used machine from $WORK; a Dell Precision 470 workstation, dual Xeon Nocona 2.8GHz processors, 4GB RAM (takes up to 16GB). So, I need a DVD of my usual desktop distro (OpenSuSE) for x64. Being that I’m at work (Rutgers Unviersity), I figured the quickest thing would be to find an Internet2 mirror, as Rutgers has 400Gbps peering on NJedgeNet.

Unfortunately, the OpenSuSE Mirror List doesn’t mention which sites have I2 peering. Luckily, the first logical one I tried – the Harvard mirror – was showing an I2/MAGIPE route via traceroute.

If anyone else needs an I2 mirror of OpenSuSE, http://mirrors.med.harvard.edu/opensuse/ seems to do it. My desktop was getting a sustained +/- 160 Mbps transfer rate, and I got the entire 4.3GB DVD image in under 2-1/2 minutes.