Marten Terpstra writes:

bob@informatics.rutherford.ac.uk writes: * Marten, * * > The UK and DE have been counted by ULCC and DE-NIC, * > and the output collected at the NCC. As you will see, this has increased * > counts for both countries quite significantly, especially the UK. * * The increase in UK figures you saw may not be due to the method of * collection, but rather a real effect. Our own figures showed a substantial * increase this month -- about 4,200 "real" hosts. (Our accounting of * "real" hosts is always a bit more conservative than yours -- we identified * 40636 this month, rather than the 43301 you saw. This is possibly because * we have a better (local) understanding of what constitutes a duplicate?)

I don't get it. Tony uses *exactly* the same tools for counting as I do, so it is quite impossible that the definition of duplicates is different, because the tools decides what is a duplicate and what is not. Also, from private mails between Tony and me, his count has always been higher than mine, and Tony has been using the same tools right from the start. If you are not talking about the figures Tony regularly sends around in the UK, what other hostcount measure do you take ? I understand that some of the increase is real increase, but the rest is increase due to to better connectivity.

Marten and Bob are right. We had a big jump with a lot of delegations this mont but unfortunately, the count Bob got (my monthly auto-script) actually didn't get as much as the local count I did for Marten. We lost a couple of zones for some reason that had a lot of duplicates. As Marten says I do use the same tools so it is not a local understanding of duplicates thing. I hope this clears this up.

As for the duplicates, our program defines a host with more than one hostname for the same IP address as a duplicate host. So for instance;

mail.Munich.Germany.eu.net 86400 IN A 139.4.6.1 victoria.Munich.Germany.eu.net 86400 IN A 139.4.6.1

is counted as one (1) duplicate host, because it is the same machine with more than one name. These duplicates are checked inside the domain it is counting; in case of the hostcount this is the top-level domain. Also of course, hosts with more than one IP address are only counted once, but these do not show up in the duplicates.

* We still have a considerable number of JIPS sites that have not yet * delegated so I guess we'll carry on growing for a while yet...

I guess so. You should be able to get very near Germany soon ...

This is true. We have a lot of zone still not delegated.

-Marten