A proposal about hostcount and DNS

>>>>> "PB" == Piet Beertema <Piet.Beertema at cwi.nl> writes:

Hi Piet!

 PB>     The current hostcount methods builds it's counting on the DNS A
 PB>     records but nowdays is there a lot of machines which is not being
 PB>     registred in DNS while they can make use of the Internet resources.
 PB>     Example of such machines may be machines behind firewalls, private
 PB>     addresses (193.168/16 and 10/8) or dial-in machines. These machines
 PB>     will not be found in the DNS and therefore will not be counted.
 PB>     In the effort of possibly make the hostcount values show more of the
 PB>     reality in some sense it would be good to get some method of collecting
 PB>     such hidden information.
 PB> I'd suggest to first pose the question what the *need* is
 PB> of a more accurate hostcount. It's good to have a rough
 PB> idea about the number of hosts, but I fail to see any use
 PB> for an *accurate* hostcount (other than perhaps for even
 PB> more unwanted "commercial interest"). And if we would come
 PB> up with even the possibility of an accurate hostcount, the
 PB> next request would be for an accurate user count...

First, this is certainly not an intent to get precise numbers, just
geting somewhat closer.

Secondly, I assumed that there would be a separate discussion on the
need for better values. This was just a small proposal to maybe
provide better numbers (it may very well fail, infact there is very
good chanses for it). So, IF people want better numbers here is a
proposal of a method to get those. If no one sees an interest in such
numbers then we can just forget the whole thing.

Cheers,
Magnus