Forum OpenACS Q&A: AOLserver increase on Netcraft

Posted by Todd Gillespie on 06/02/01 01:03 AM

Just an interesting Friday afternoon datum:
Netcraft's May webserver survey is out, and AOLserver shows a ~40%
jump, up to 377000 servers. (As a % increase of all server types,
that's only a .35% jump, but still...) Evangelism finally working??

Digging into the netcraft archives, nsd usage is mostly flat, with
some huge jumps from time to time. Near as I can tell, these
correlate to months with a lot of arsDigita news on slashdot.
Evangelists, you have a new mission.

2: Response to AOLserver increase on Netcraft (response to 1)

Posted by Talli Somekh on 06/02/01 02:29 AM

Well, I think the mydomain.com ACS system might have something to do with that... Is there anyone that would like to come out of the closet and mention his work, please? ;)

talli

3: Response to AOLserver increase on Netcraft (response to 1)

Posted by Petru Paler on 06/02/01 11:15 PM

Most of the AOLservers reported on Netcraft are actually domains hosted by mydomain.com. Before September 2000 (when I switched mydomain to use a custom Tcl script for it's domains) there were about 5000 AOLserver sites.

4: Response to AOLserver increase on Netcraft (response to 1)

Posted by Antonio Laterza on 07/01/01 11:05 PM

Where are 377000 servers that was in may 2001? How is possible that in june 2001 there are only 1512 servers running AOLserver?

5: Response to AOLserver increase on Netcraft (response to 1)

Posted by Adam Farkas on 07/01/01 11:15 PM

Antonio -- the bulk of the AOLserver machines that were counted were being run from a virtual hosting company. They had several hundred thousand domains that were counted by netcraft.

Anyone know if they bit the dust, or have been disqualified from the survey?

6: Response to AOLserver increase on Netcraft (response to 1)

Posted by Todd Gillespie on 07/02/01 01:19 AM

Antonio: you might notice that there is a 'NaviServer' entry with 3448 servers. I'm not really sure how netcraft identifies and groups servers, nor what can account for the drop. I'm not too sure that any service like netcraft can reliably count fringe servers anyway.

7: Response to AOLserver increase on Netcraft (response to 1)

Posted by Petru Paler on 07/02/01 06:04 AM

We changed the server string (it's still aolserver), but Netcraft seems to have eliminated it for good from the survey.

8: Apache Plus (response to 1)

Posted by good bye on 07/02/01 09:24 AM

why not just change the name of AOLserver/naviserver/
OpenNSD/whatever to "Apache Plus"? when someone asks "are
you using Apache?" just respond with "Apache Plus." If they want
more information, just say "it is a webserver, like Apache, with
some additional enhancements." This should make anyone who
cares feel much better.

9: Response to AOLserver increase on Netcraft (response to 1)

Posted by S. Y. on 08/10/01 07:10 PM

Some security pundits say to change the server identifier string anyhow to make crackers' lives more difficult (e.g., the Nessus vulnerability assessment tool tells you to do this). If you run Tcl or ADP pages, perhaps it's not going to matter, but after all, if some cracker is portscanning and looking for a vulnerable web server, they'll probably automate the whole thing and toss out obscure/unidentifiable server identifier strings.

Way back when I was running my own publicly accessible server, I changed the string to anonymous/service, so I only ended up as a "other" Netcraft statistic. You can change it in one of the include files (nsd.h, I think) then compile normally.

I'm not too sure about Netcraft's methodology and wouldn't really look at their statistics without a very large grain of salt. They admit to being thrown off by load balancers, etc. (try www.geocities.com). If sites like Geocities and Yahoo are running on a bunch of different OS + server software combinations behind load balancers, then they are not being properly represented in the Netcraft surveys (and I bet both sites have more than one machine apiece).

Nonetheless, Netcraft is a clever tool that occasionally comes in handy.