News and Announcements

Oct 15, 2005 - October Newsletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

BSD Certification Group Newsletter
October 2005


Contents
  1. New Whitepaper
  2. NYCBSDCon
  3. BSD Usage Survey
  4. BSDA Exam Objectives Published
  5. New Website Format
  6. Website Statistics Report and Analysis
  7. GUBUG Install Fest
  8. Incorporation Details
  9. Mailing Lists
  10. About this Newsletter


1 New Whitepaper

Bruce Montague, author of "Elements of Operating System and Internet History: A BSD Perspective", has written an informative whitepaper which was recently published on the FreeBSD website. Bruce offers insight into the history of the BSD and GPL licenses and the advantages of choosing a BSD license. This is an excellent paper to refer others to when explaining the BSD license. The article is at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html.

2 NYCBSDCon

NYCBSDCon was held on September 17 in NYC and was well attended and received. Dru Lavigne started off the conference with a talk on BSD Certification.

For those who missed the conference, there was a live blog at
http://opensource.weblogsinc.com/search/?q=nycbsdcon&submit=Search+%BB.

The video for the talks is currently being edited; we'll provide the link for the download once it is ready.

3 BSD Usage Survey

There was a tremendous response to the BSD Usage Survey which ran from September 12 to 31. There were over 4300 responders to the survey, which was available in six languages, and they indicated BSD systems being used in over 80 countries throughout the world.

We're currently writing up the results of the survey which should be ready for publication within the next few days. An announcement will be made when the survey results are published.

4 BSDA Exam Objectives Published

The BSDA Certification Requirements Document was released on October 6. This document contains the seven study domains for the BSDA certification as well as detailed objectives for each domain. In addition, it describes the BSDA candidate, the operating system versions covered by the exam, and the recertification requirements for the exam.

This document is not only of interest to those considering taking the BSDA certification, but it also provides a framework that can be used to construct course curricula as well as study guides.

5 New Website Format

As you've probably noticed, the format of the website has been updated to allow easier access to published documents. The 'news' tab now allows you to find at a glance downloadable PDFs to newsletters, press releases and publications. The 'meet us' tab now includes the names and bios for each translation team.

If you have any suggestions to further improve the site, send a note to the discuss mailing list or fill out the contact form on the website.

6 Website Statistics Report and Analysis

By Patrick Tracanelli

In September, we had 6510 different visitors, which is very high. Let's consider that in August, we had 6444 and in July we had 6698, which was over 100% more, when compared to June. Now it is 6510 which is also over 100% when compared to June and a little fewer than July. So we had three consecutive big months for the website, which may let us to consider that approximately 6500 visitors is our new reality. In September, we had 79,997 webpage hits (against 70,705 in August).

It averages about 217 visitors a day, and about 52Mbytes of data transfered in a daily basis (our record, from July is approximately 220Mb)

On September 18th, we reached the month's top access, counting 817 visitors, and 128,155 Kbytes transfered.

We still have our main access period between 10 and 18 hours. This 8-hours period is responsible for approximately 79% of all our visits in September, which are all "commercial" period of times, so people still visiting us mostly when they are at work.

In September, we had the second Survey released, and it was certainly what attracted more visits to our website. The Survey URL was the most accessed link in our website, counting very much more hits when compare to the second most, the root URL. It means that direct linking from outside websites issued a very high percentage of our accesses.

Top 10 accessed pages

The top 10 accessed pages are:

#       Hits    Bytes   URL

1       15147   291956  /phpESP/public/survey.php

2       2503    12888   /

3       1744    4206    /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

4       1448    405291  /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

5       889     16876   /news.htm

6       640     1884    /cert.htm

7       376     1455    /resources.htm

8       323     3865    /about.htm

9       320     1089    /goals.htm

10      318     218576  /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

Top 5 URL by Kbytes

This month, our top URL regarding data transfer rate is mostly related to the Road Map, which is still getting downloaded along the days in the last month, and the second Survey, as well as the last Survey Report.

#       Hits    Kbytes  URL

1       1448    405291  /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

2       15147   291956  /phpESP/public/survey.php

3       318     218576  /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

4       13      23497   /survey01_report/pages/Page_6.pdf

5       23      21700   /survey01_report/Survey01_pt-br.a.html

Top 10 Entry Pages

In September, the root website is again the main entry page, followed by the English Usage Survey and the News section.

#       Hits            Visits

1       2503    3.13%   1754    32.85%  /

2       1744    2.18%   1577    29.54%  
/downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

3       889     1.11%   543     10.17%  /news.htm

4       305     0.38%   274     5.13%   /downloads/PressReleaseRoadMap.html

5       640     0.80%   98      1.84%   /cert.htm

6       323     0.40%   85      1.59%   /about.htm

7       78      0.10%   71      1.33%   /media.htm

8       376     0.47%   55      1.03%   /resources.htm

9       320     0.40%   54      1.01%   /goals.htm

10      108     0.14%   52      0.97%   /downloads/nl_200508_en_en.html

Top Referrals

This month, our top referrers are now a mix of the big change we had in the last month and what used to be the usual referrers. Chinese, German and Brazilian websites are still attracting a number of visitors to BSD CG website, the first two mentioned countries are represented by blog.china-pub.com and bsdforen.de in the top-10.

Slashdot is the one which brings more visitors to us, followed by Richard's Tao Security.

Richard's Tao Security is not on the third place but was the third website which refers to us most in August.

All others can be followed at:

#       Hits            Referrer

1       2189    2.74%   http://bsd.slashdot.org/

2       1704    2.13%   http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl

3       1693    2.12%   http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/

4       1013    1.27%   http://blog.china-pub.com/blog.asp

5       646     0.81%   http://blog.china-pub.com/more.asp

6       371     0.46%   http://slashdot.org/

7       360     0.45%   http://www.osnews.com/

8       317     0.40%   http://bsdnews.com/

9       200     0.25%   http://www.bsdforen.de/showthread.php

10      187     0.23%   http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/05/09/18/1743239.shtml

Just like on the last months, the Mozilla family of web browsers are still the most used navigation applications that people use to visit us, which count over 59% of total visits. Most visits of the Mozilla family browsers are from Microsoft Windows platforms using Firefox. The second most usual combination is Mac OS X with Firefox/Mozilla, the third is FreeBSD with Firefox and FreeBSD with Mozilla. Later, we get Linux with Firefox/Mozilla, and everything else are about the same on usage compared to each other.

Microsoft Internet Explorer on both Microsoft Windows (22%) and Mac OS X (6,3%) represent approximately 30% of our visitors' browser application.

Google Bot and MSN Bot are usually getting to our website. It is true of a number of other spiders. The curious thing to note is that many people is downloading our files using the fetch(1) command. "fetch libfetch/2.0" issued around 2000 hits this month.

One more big difference. Opera which was around 2% usually, is now used by 4.6% of our visitors - over 100% growth rate. Maybe because Opera had some changes in its browser licensing related to "ads"?

Thirty-five-percent of our visits were from US in August, while about 26% could not be resolved. Among those resolved, Poland, Germany and Brazil are the countries which do not natively speak English with the highest number of visitors. Here it follows the top 10 networks/countries:

#       Hits    Files   Kbytes  Country/Region/Network

1       21052   15615   467227  Network

2       14756   9921    338171  US Commercial

3       13581   9675    257025  Unresolved/Unknown

4       2565    1841    32571   Poland

5       2195    1625    33203   Germany

6       1913    1330    31776   US Educational

7       1800    1382    32316   Brazil

8       1760    1074    43494   Canada

9       1618    1163    22742   Netherlands

10      1593    1179    20373   Italy 

7 GUBUG Install Fest

By Dan Langille

http://www.langille.org/

I spent the afternoon of 24 September 2005 with the Greater Utah BSD User Group (GUBUG - http://gubug.org/) during their InstallFest. I was picked up at the Salt Lake City airport by Anthony Chavez, who treated me to a great burger and fries at a local shop. Damn it was good. Then we headed off to the location provided by Veritie (http://www.verite.com/). They had a great setup with wireless and wired connections. Many people were on hand to help install and set up all the BSD flavours.

I gave a short talk on Bacula, my favourite backup solution
(http://www.bacula.org/), and handed out some BSDCan (http://www.bsdcan.org/) and BSD Certification brochures (http://www.bsdcertification.org/).

There were quite a few prizes given out. Later in the evening, the pizza arrived. By this time, I was quite zonked so I had head off to my hotel rather early in the evening. I was very tired from my 5:30am start.

8 Incorporation Details

On October 9, 2005, the BSD Certification Group Inc. was formally incorporated listing Dru Lavigne, George Rosamund and Jim Brown as incorporators. The incorporation was done in New Jersey, USA. The Group has also received a Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN) and also registered with the State of New Jersey. A copy of the incorporation certificate will be received soon. Once the dust settles, we will process our 501(c)(3) application with the IRS as a non-profit organization.

9 Mailing Lists

The BSD Certification Group mailing list currently has 805 subscribers. And the announcements list has 118 subscribers.

If you are not on the announcements list, please sign up at
http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert-announce/. It is a closed list for announcements regarding the The BSD Certification Group.

The general discussion list is at http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert/.

10 About this Newsletter

The BSD Certification Group newsletter is published every month, near the middle of the month.

Thank you to the contributors to this newsletter: Dru Lavigne, Dan Langille, Jim Brown, George Rosamond, and Patrick Tracanelli. The editor is Jeremy C. Reed.

If you have any news items related to the BSD Certification, please let us know by submitting via the contact form on the website or by sending an email to newsletter@BSDCertificationGroup.org. Or if you would like to volunteer for the translation team please send a note with the subject "translation" on the website's contact form.

Note that the "August" newsletter was published in mid-September and a newsletter for "September" was not published. A newsletter was not missed.



























































































































































































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