News and Announcements

Nov 15, 2005 - November Newsletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

BSD Certification Group Newsletter
November 2005


Contents

1 Upcoming Events

Siju Oommen George will be handing out 1500 copies of the BSD Certification brochure at FOSS.IN, India's largest Open Source event, to be held in Bangalore from November 29th to December 2nd. You'll find Siju at one of the several BSD booths in the exhibition area of the conference. The website is at http://foss.in/2005.

2 In the News

Axel Gruner and Angelika Goeszler, members of the BSD Certification German translation team, wrote an article on using BSD which was recently published in Chip Magazine (http://www.chip.de/opensource). A PDF of their article in German is available for download at http://www.encephalon.de/publikationen/assets/FreeBSD_Goessler_Gruner. pdf.

Axel has provided an English translation of the section of the article that pertains to BSD Certification:

"At the beginning of 2005 BSD Certification was established by a group of computer professionals. With the certification, the BSD Certification Group will define an internationally equated training which also makes Open Source know-how for employers measurable. At this time, the BSD Certification Group is working out an implementation and a business plan. This project is singular because it is done by an international Open Source Community."

3 Changes to the Website

Some new items were added to the website in the past month. The Advisory Board section has been added to the ``Meet Us'' page of the website
(http://www.bsdcertification.org//meet/). We welcome Richard Bejtlich, Greg Lehey, David Maxwell and Marshall Kirk McKusick as Advisory Board members.

The FAQs have been updated to reflect the publication of the Roadmap and the BSDA Certification Requirements document. The BSDA Command Reference is now available as a separate PDF and is referenced in FAQ #6.

Those of you who read the recent Scott Long interview will recognize the quote on certification which now appears, with Scott's permission, on the main page of the website.

4 Incorporation

BSD Certification Group Inc. was incorporated in the state of New Jersey as a non-profit on October 9, 2005. An application has also been made for 501(c)(3) status. If this application is approved, donations to the Group will be fully tax deductible in the United States.

The Bylaws for the BSD Certification Group Inc. were ratified on November 13, 2005. You can read the Bylaws as well as the details regarding incorporation and the business plan on the new BSDCG tab of the website.

5 Donations

You'll also find a new Donate tab on the website which includes a PayPal button. The BSDCG will be deciding this month which agency to partner with for psychometric analysis of the BSDA test questions. We have received estimates ranging from $15,000 to $35,000 USD.

Please consider a donation to help support these costs. All donors will have their names posted on the website. If you don't wish to have your name appear, please indicate so in the "Optional Note" box on the PayPal site when you make your donation.

6 Mailing Lists

The BSD Certification Group mailing list currently has 814 subscribers. And the announcements list has 125 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/.

7 Website Statistics Report and Analysis

By Patrick Tracanelli

In October, we had 8203 different visitors, which is above the new average stated in September. In the first months of the year, we had an average of visitors which used to count around 3000 and 3600. In the last 3 months, this average increased a lot, around 100% and we found out it was not a temporary change, because it rested for over 90 days. Now this new average, 6500 visitors, was surpassed around 1/4, getting to 8203 visitors. If this raise is motivated by a temporary cause or not, we will find out in the next months. This month, we had 108.603 website hits, which is also very high when compared to the last month's approximately 75000 hits average.

It averages about 303 visitors a day, and about 65 Mbytes of data transferred in a daily basis (our record, from July is approximately 220Mb)

On October 16th, we reached the month's top access, counting 520 visitors, and 40804 Kbytes transferred.

We still have our main access period between 10 and 18 hours. This eight-hour period is responsible for approximately 81% of all our visits in October, which are all "commercial" period of times, so people still visiting us mostly when they are at work.

In the last month, we had the second survey released, and it is still a well accessed URL in October. This month, the BSD Associate PDF release also counts up on the most accessed URLs, including direct access from outside websites. But this month the most accessed URL was the root URL, so, even considering some direct access to our internal pages, it was not that much, considering the last 2 months.

The top 10 accessed pages are:

#       Hits    Bytes   URL

1       6465    41265   /

2       3871    4707    /error.html

3       2714    2326    /phpESP/public/survey.php

4       2249    213533  /phpESP/admin/managejpb.php

5       621     205720  /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

6       593     161510  /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

7       368     7519    /news.htm

8       364     877     /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

9       352     1013    /cert.htm

10      241     177715  /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

After the new website moved to the current online one, the BSDCG www site has changed a lot when related to how the web pages are dealed. Since the Group started, the website were all mainly static HTML webpages generated dynamically from other internal BSD CG servers but available statically in the front. Now that all security measures where taken, the WWW team is confident to make it completely dynamic. Unfortunately a consequence is that all the direct linked contents are made unavailable from the original URLs, since the URL for each content is now dynamic and not static anymore. That means that all sorts of direct links which happened to work before the website move, are now broken.

This clearly reflects the high volume of "error.html" page hitting, which is the second most 'visited' URL now.

Top 5 URL by Kbytes

This month our top URLs regarding data transfer rate are mostly related to the BSD Associate exam document, which, together with the Roadmap, are the most downloaded files this month.

#       Hits    Kbytes  URL

1       621     205720  /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

2       241     177715  /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

3       593     161510  /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

4       6465    41265   /

5       3       8769    /survey01_report/pages/Page_2.pdf

Top 10 Entry Pages

In October, the root website is again the main entry page, followed by the error pages, the news tab and the English Usage Survey.

#       Hits            Visits

1       6465    1957    /

2       3871    1246    /error.html

3       368     277     /news.htm

4       364     270     /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

5       352     76      /cert.htm

6       164     60      /about.htm

7       53      56      /media.htm

8       156     39      /goals.htm

9       210     31      /resources.htm

10      158     29      /faq.htm

Top Referrals

This month, our top referrers are a set of websites which usually show up as the top referrers for all months, but did not usually show up together in the same month. Slashdot is the number one site which attracts visitors to us, followed by Richard's Tao Security blog. The Chinese Blog site, "http://blog.china-pub.com" is the third biggest reference to BSDCG's website, and China is there again, with a second big site referring to us, among the top 10 referrals. It is FreeBSDChina.org. The Polish BSDGuru.org is also attracting some visitors to our website.

All others can be followed at:

#       Hits    Referrer

1       1451    http://bsd.slashdot.org/

2       1326    http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/

3       1207    http://blog.china-pub.com/blog.asp

4       1158    http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl

5       703     http://blog.china-pub.com/more.asp

6       236     http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/viewtopic.php

7       186     http://www.bsdcertification.org

8       110     http://www.bsdguru.org/

9       103     http://www.google.com/search

10      76      http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/05/09/18/1743239.shtml

11      70      http://slashdot.org/index.pl

About Browsers / User Agents

Just like on the last month's analysis, Mozilla family of web browsers are still the most used navigation applications that people use to visit us, which count over 58% of total visits. Most visits of Mozilla family browser 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 (23%) and Mac OS X (6,9%) 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 7500 hits this Month. Now the very curious and note, even more curious than the "Sony Ericson" mobile phones which from times to times visits us, is the fact that we had close to a dozen hits from a Sony Playstation box. If they are running Sony's software or Linux or NetBSD, we could not find out only checking the browser's user agent. But someone is periodically checking for BSD CG news while gaming online with Playstation. With the current XBOX's patches for BSD, shall we expect more video games' hits on later months?

Geo (countries) Statistics on Visitors

Thirty-four percent of our visits were from US in August, while about 16% could not be resolved. Among those resolved, Canada, Poland, Brazil and Germany follow the top listing of countries which visits us most often. With the exception of Canada, the others are countries which do not natively speak English. This month other countries like France, Australia and Netherlands show up on the top-10.

Here you can follow the top-30 countries/regions which visited us in October:

1       18000   13360   414001  Network

2       10294   7727    170890  Unresolved/Unknown

3       9390    7123    204442  US

4       1707    1240    31515   Canada

5       1582    1226    17947   Poland

6       1558    1208    28157   Brazil

7       1044    854     19843   Germany

8       848     686     19847   US

9       775     647     15485   Netherlands

10      721     566     17861   France

11      702     560     7869    Australia

12      684     573     10860   United

13      641     460     8210    Italy

14      592     469     5670    Taiwan

15      495     373     6555    Non-Profit

16      361     280     8789    Mexico

17      319     246     2982    Portugal

18      282     226     5579    Romania

19      281     236     6407    Sweden

20      280     205     2832    Belgium

21      273     208     4982    Finland

22      256     210     3429    Japan

23      249     214     3636    Russian

24      223     192     4702    India

25      168     125     4689    Norway

26      139     112     6728    US

27      133     126     641     Lithuania

28      132     100     3178    Greece

29      128     94      2263    Switzerland

30      122     93      1680    Denmark

Search expressions

Ninety-six percent of the searches which link to BSDCG's website is made on Google. The other 4% is shared among MSN, Yahoo and Altavista, with some minor (fewer than 0.3%) for Lycos bot. The top five strings which goes to us when people search the Web are:

#       Hits    Search Expression

1       31      bsd certification

2       7       BSD Certification

3       4       guillermo lasso

4       4       la encuesta

5       3       BSD certification

8 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 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.

Jeremy C. Reed 2005-11-16




























































































































































































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