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On a daily basis, I update the Geographic IP database that I created many years ago. Although not as powerful as some of the commercially available Geographic databases, it has more than served my purposes over the years.
One of the benefits of collecting this data is being able to extract substantial metrics on the distribution of IPV4 addresses. This post is the latest in a series of descriptions of the distribution of addresses at the moment.
Here are the Registrar Stats for IPV4 addresses as of March 14 2009.

The ARIN IPV4 address space (which includes the US) is still the largest by far, with nearly 3 times the allocated IPV4 addresses of the two next largest registrars, RIPE and APNIC. The dominance of the US is even more noticeable in the IPV4 addresses by Country table.

Belying its growing importance on the Internet stage, China has grown from fourth place in the first of these analyses to second place in this study. However, it still has a long way to go before it catches up with the US.

An interesting concept that comes out of this data is that China is making do with substantially fewer public IPV4 addresses than the US is. This means that they have wholeheartedly embraced IPV6 (unlikely) or are using the private IP space for most communications.

Here are the browser stats for Newest Industry as of March 14 2009. Not a large amount of traffic, but it is indicative of what most folks with technical content on their blogs likely see.

What did surprise me was the number of people who are still using MSIE 6.0. I am not sure what is continuing to perpetuate the presence of this percentage of people on this antiquated browser, other than large corporations running this by mandate of the IT department.

I think that with the release of all the new browsers this year, support for MSIE 6.0 should simply cease. I will gladly install a javascript library that will kill pages for MSIE 6.0 visitors, announcing that the Internet is no longer available to them.

Over the last seven days, GrabPERF has been running in a very unstable state. This appears to be directly related to the use of InnoDB as the DB engine on a few of the larger tables in the database. [InnoDB changeover discussed here]
Today, the system was offline for several hours before I noticed that the DB had failed to restart properly. Apparently the system simply decided that the InnoDB engine had gone away.
All tables have now been switched back to the good old MyISAM and all the headaches that come with that.

One additional changes was made to GrabPERF today. The homepage with the Top and Bottom Performers, has been changed from a dynamic page to one that is autogenerated every two minutes. This graph should explain why.

The dynamic page was starting to push 20-25 seconds just for the Top 20 List. When I switched to the static list, times dropped to less than 1 second.
It’s always bad when a Web performance measurement site has poor performance.

Today we undertook two maintenance and upgrade tasks at GrabPERF that have been neglected for too long.

1. The Agent code was streamlined and removed the connection error sub-routine. It seems that the latest versions of cURL no longer support the connection error determination (I can only imagine the madness of trying to support this on multiple OSs), so it has been removed as part of the error detection process. This change has been pushed out to four agents for testing and will be distributed to all other active agents after this is complete.
2. Upgrade of cURL to 7.19.4 on four agents. The same four agents that have the new agent code have also had the underlying HTTP(S) engine (cURL) upgrade to 7.19.4. Although this supports no new features that I am aware of, it is always good to be on top of the latest release with bug-fixes.

We are also trying to determine how to capture the URL that we connect to when we take a measurement. As far as cURL is documented, it still does not appear to support this feature.

The Web analytics firm StatCounter has released a set of metrics that mines their entire dataset to provide worldwide metrics on browsers, searches, and operating systems.
This is the kind of data that everyone should be interested in. And it’s free. Check it out at StatCounter GlobalStats.

The GrabPERF Retail Web Performance Index is an extension of the Holiday Performance Index created for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday craze in 2008.
There is a methodology statement explaining more about the index below the data table.
Please add any comments or questions to this post.

On the weekend, I upgraded the database engine for GrabPERF to Mysql 5.1 and switched the main data table from MyISAM to InnoDB.
The switch to InnoDB was done because of the locking issues that were occurring during long queries, especially when doing ad-hoc analysis. The row-level (versus table-level) locking of InnoDB has removed most of these issues.
I have been seeing some strange behavior with the new engine. As a result of this, I will be re-starting the database engine twice a day. There should be no degradation, as this is simply a daemon re-start, not a machine re-start.

Well, it’s done. After a week of trying this and that, I finally got DSL (DamnSmallLinux) rolling on the Fujitsu B2131 last night.
To remind folks what the challenge was (and is for some of the linux dev teams out their who claim to support older platforms): Install a fully-functioning OS on a laptop machine built in 1999/2000 without a CD drive.
DSL has a great boot floppy image that works with their embedded version of the OS installed on a Flash drive – ok, the flash drive made the challenge less problematic than originally described.
However, I lay the challenge out to all of the Linux distros: Create an across the INTERNET (not that crazy PXE boot stuff) install that can be started with boot floppies.
The B2131 has a large enough hard drive and enough power to run Xubuntu, but installing it easily (i.e. my 10 year-old son could do it) makes modern linux distros completely unreachable for people trying to easily make old machines go.
So, linux geeks, think you can do this?

A co-worker gave me an ancient Fujitsu Lifebook B-2131. I want to turn it into an ultra-portable netbook thingie.
The catch? No cd-rom.
Apparently the world has forgotten the world of the boot floppy and internet installs.
Well, almost everyone.
Turns out that if you have a floppy drive, and 5 spare 1.44MB disks, there is a way to install Ubuntu over the Internet! [SEE HERE]
We ran out of time and floppy disks today, but this looks like a cool father-son project for this week.
Further updates as they are warranted.