BlueOnyx usage count

As we're approaching the 1st birthday of BlueOnyx it is time for some reflections and a short tally of achivements.

12 months ago a private discussion between Brian Smith and myself kicked off the development of BlueOnyx. After three months of insane coding efforts later we released BlueOnyx on 31st December 2008.

Of course we haven't been idle since then and as you all might have noticed: BlueOnyx has seen lots of changes and improvements since its initial release. New developers signed on and more and more new faces appear on the BlueOnyx users list.

Naturally all of us have wondered how sucessful BlueOnyx really is. How many people are really using it?

Sure, the web statistics on the YUM repositories can shed some light on that. Also the download counts for the ISO images. But unfortunately these are spread over several mirrors and no single person has access to all those mirrors.

During most months we see a few hundred ISO downloads on the average just from the main mirror, sometimes generating terabytes of traffic just for the ISO. While this could be an indication of the increasing spread and popularity of BlueOnyx, it doesn't allow us to even start to guess about the number of servers that actually use BlueOnyx.

So about a month ago we rewrote the main mirroring script for the YUM repositories and extended it with features that log the IP and date of YUM updates in an anonymous fashion and started to tally up the numbers of unique YUM update requests.

This method is of course inherently flawed and will never tell the whole picture. Some people may not update against the official mirrors. Some people may (against good judgement) choose not to update at all or only very sporadically. Or several dozens of internally hosted servers all update from the same router IP address and are tallied only once.

But we are proud to report that there are more than {bx_servercount} servers which are running on BlueOnyx right now.

Many thanks to all of you. You made it happen and we'll do our best to keep BlueOnyx strong and prospering.