Hi, Daniel Rosen wrote...
The de domain shows the highest increase for September with approximately 35,000 hosts more than in August.
Shouldn't that be .nl?
nl 320304 1947310 529824 1417486 + 54471
Yes, apologies, human-error strikes again. I live in Holland, I should have noticed this :-) * > Is this loss due to a technical problem or some general chang * es * > (named-based vhosting instead of IP-based vhosting)? Or just * > "fluctuation"? Every time I've investigated large drops, they've turned out to be due to one of two things. Either... - an ISP which runs secondary for it's customers from a single DNS server restricted access for one reason or another, thus removing lots of litte-medium size zones from the count all at once or - an ISP or end-user with a large zone restricts AXFR on all it's servers. In this case, the number of hosts for a TLD can drop dramatically, even though the number of zones counted still increases. Simon Leinen wrote...
(2) by moving to a "split" DNS scheme, in which only hosts with external services (in the "DMZ") are listed in the DNS, the internal hosts being in another version of the organisation's zone which is only visible from the inside.
The latter is proably difficult to work around.
The hostcount, despite the name, does not count hosts, it counts A records. Increases in the use of split-DNS, name-based virtual hosting etc have meant that the correspondence between the number of A records and the number of hosts has rapidly decreased. There's not a lot that can be done about this within the framework of the hostcount. However, there are several things that can be done to combat the AXFR-block spread. For instance, when asked, most organsations (ISP's and end-users both) will open up transfers to the collecting machine once it's clear what the purpose of the AXFR is. Unfortunately, most of the resources available for the hostcount have been applied to running the hostcount every month, not much has been left for maintenance and other issues.
Asking for such cooperation would be easier if there was a strict privacy policy for the intermediate data produced by the hostcount software.
We have an AUP for the hostcount data on the RIPE NCC website and only grant access to the data based on signing of this AUP. http://www.ripe.net/hostcount/aup.html Unfortunately, there's a hole in this policy because most local collectors still make the hostcount data publicly available. Coordination of the closure of this hole is part of the maintenance activities of the hostcount for which no time has been available. Regards, Lee Wilmot RIPE NCC