Stephan Kulow wrote: Steve, the download statistics from download.opensuse.org is obviously a huge amount of data to go through for unique IP's. It must be a hugely difficult task as you have indicated, and I would think that the presence of any company using NAT'ed internal IP's would have an unknown impact. Just querulous, when a KDE install registers for its first update servers to be assigned, the contact and assignment is made by [Contacting Novell's Servers? - Please wait]. Also caries the hardware profile etc. and any Novel Registration if any. And with a Gnome install it goes to smolt. Do we get any other useful stats from Novell for KDE and SMOLT for Gnome that we could also use. What do we do with the hardware profile also transmitted? I only ask and I have no idea, and have not found out anyone who does know. Just thought this may be able to provide more user data for kde/gnome installs and also included NAT'ed IP downloads. There is normally only one contact made with Novell Servers for update assignment repos??? Do we learn anything from Hardware Profile info's from Novell Servers also???? Scott

Stephan Kulow wrote: I gather by now, a feature request has been open to help with statistics which does not require such labour ad PC time and cost. If cannot find the feature request, if it exists, and I un-subscribed from this list weeks ago. If we do create a feature request, the only reliable static element to count may be the MAC address of the PC's cookies that contacts any automated counter. If we use the MAC address of a NAT'd group of PC's we only count 1PC when there could be 100 behind this one NAT'd and MAC address. To expedite this feature request, if one exists, could be please consider counting unique MAC Address of Every PC via the PC cookie. Counting IP addresses is rather useless especially if hundreds of PC's exist on any LAN that fall into the black hole of 192.168.?.? of NAT'd single IP's of the Modem/Router. I can only speak from Australia's point of view, but the only time we use a public IP Address is for any Server that requires either Public Access or Internal/Public Access and even them we use a lot of Dynamic DNS for HTTP Servers as it is so easy. In just about ever other condition we use NAT. Government, in the past, for audit purposes did use public unique IP's for the LAN. This however is slowly becoming less and less, in-favour of NAT'd IP's on the LAN with MAC Identification and MAC filtering of open DHCP LAN's and WIFI PC's. Here in Australia the only unique thing we can guarantee is the MAC address, IP's can be changed and are mostly NAT'ed having hundreds of PC's behind the Modem/Routers and an unknown number of VPN Linked PC's behind the same single NAT'd IP. Statistically speaking, I would recommend thinking alone the lines of counting PC's MAC address via the PC's cookie as the only true reliable way of presenting statistics. MAC address are the only possible, non transportable and unique to every PC in the World. IP Addresses are potential unless and misleading and I have not even mentioned DMZ LAN's with possibly hundreds of PC's having a DMZ address. I would be grateful if another could add this as a possibility to the feature request for gathering of statistics which may be more accurate and less labour intensive. Many Thanks Scott The other distortion of a PC's IP comes from any VPN link, where the VPN link is behind a single NAT'd IP and there may be hundreds of NAT'd IP's behind each VPN Link.