News and Announcements

Dec 15, 2005 - December Newsletter

Newsletter     English     (available in pdf)

BSD Certification Group Newsletter
December 2005


Contents

1 Report from FOSS India

Siju George has returned from FOSS India (http://foss.in/2005) with this report about his experience in handing out copies of the BSD Certification brochure:

On the 2nd, 3rd and 4th days of FOSS somewhere between 1200-1300 brochures were distributed to the delegates. Since FOSS did not have BSD representations earlier, many people were surprised to find a BSD booth and even more people were shocked to hear that the BSD community worldwide are taking a certification initiative without finding a vendor to do it for them. All most people could do was wonder at the brochure and say "hey! that's cool, A certification initiated by the community? This is going to be different! certainly!".

David Fetter (http://fetter.org/) from the PostgreSQL development team approached me to know the details because he said that the PostgreSQL people wanted to do something similar for PostgreSQL. He asked me to furnish him with the details of how we actually go about it once the things are finalized.

Tariq Sani, owner of http://www.sanisoft.com/, came and asked more info about this because he felt, unlike Zend certification for PHP which is vendor based, he wanted to have a community-driven certification for PHP.

It seems many are going to follow the path of BSD certification in the coming days. I also found to my amazement that the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore used FreeBSD servers and some of them from there were very much interested to know about the BSD certification.

I was also approached by Arun, a Red Hat trainer in Bangalore who has his own institute. He promised to give the facilities in his institute on week ends and every weekday afternoon for doing anything related to the BSDs. He said he would like to help out in providing a testing centre for BSD certification for free in Bangalore. Bangalore is the Silicon valley of India and I feel this is great! He will also be working to build up an active BUG in Bangalore.

2 Fund Raising Drive

BSD Certification needs your help! We're in the middle of our first fund-raising drive with a goal of $35,000 which will be used towards the psychometric assessment of the BSDA exam. If you've already donated, thank you for your support. If you haven't, consider visiting the Donate tab of the site to make a PayPal contribution. No donation is too small and the quicker we raise the funds, the quicker the psychometric assessment can take place.

We'd also like to ask you to make sure that the relevant forums and mailing lists that you subscribe to are aware of the fund-raising effort. We've added a downloadable Sponsorship Fact Sheet to the Donate tab of the site. If your company wished to negotiate a donation or you know of a contact at a company who may be interested, feel free to email either Dru Lavigne or Jim Brown or use the contact form on the website.

3 Thank You NYI and NYC*BUG

The BSD Certification Group would like to recognize New York Internet for the donation of space and bandwidth for our development and mirror websites. We would also like to recognize the New York City *BSD User Group for donating hardware, resources, and time for those sites and our mailing list. Thank you NYI and NYC*BUG for your generous donations and all the help you provide to the BSDCG.

The New York Internet Company is an advanced Internet Service Provider offering Internet Services since 1996. Core services include Dedicated Servers, Colocation, as well as Web Hosting and Internet Access. Their clients have two things in common: a need for mission-critical reliability, as well as NYI's personal and responsive round-the-clock technical support.

The New York City *BSD User Group provides a forum for discussion and a bridge for learning about the various BSD operating systems. Their aim is to raise awareness and to advocate the BSD's, expand the user base, and to provide insight and education to all levels of users. They offer monthly meetings on vital topics, an active mailing list, fund raising efforts for the projects, and an informative website. They also sponsor and manage the most important BSD conference on the East Coast, NYCBSDCON.

4 FreeBSD Brasil LTDA on the BSD Certification Effort

The BSD Certification Group would like to recognize FreeBSD Brasil LTDA and its partner, MDBrasil, for the primary online infrastructure provided since the beginning of the Group, and for donating server hardware, connectivity and human resources for the maintenance and availability of the main website and mail server.

FreeBSD Brasil LTDA is a FreeBSD-only oriented company which provides services and training in the FreeBSD operating system. It is three years old and counts over 400 professionals trained by its qualifications programs and many ISP/ASP companies as clients, especially government and WiFi services providers. FreeBSD Brasil is made up of people who are actively involved in FreeBSD maintenance and development as well as BSD-related activities in the Brazilian Open Source community. FreeBSD Brasil has promoted BSDCon Brasil, BSDDay Sao Paulo and many other BSD events in the largest country of South America. It has been part of the official FreeBSD pt-br documentation efforts, and involves the running of the Brazilian FreeBSD Users Group, the biggest BSD community in the country.

Human resources is contributed from FreeBSD Brasil by two BSD Certification Group members, Patrick Tracanelli and Jean M Melo, and other indirect contributors, especially relating to the localization efforts for Brazilian Portuguese.

5 New Non-Voting Chair

M. Warner Losh has volunteered to be the non-voting chair to oversee the selection of the board of director candidates. He has been involved with *BSD for more than 10 years.

Warner's first install of FreeBSD was version 1.0 Gamma, which he obtained by mailing Jordan Hubbard a blank set of floppies. Warner has served as the FreeBSD security officer, he has more than 5 years experience writing device drivers for FreeBSD, and has been a FreeBSD core member for several years. He has also contributed to NetBSD and OpenBSD, in the past. Warner has a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and was an honors student there.

6 Roadmap Translated to Mexican Spanish

The Mexican Spanish team has finished their translation of the Roadmap. It is available for download at
http://www.bsdcertification.org/downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap_mx_mx.pdf and the press release, in Mexican Spanish, can be read at
http://www.bsdcertification.org//news/&Item=pr025. A big thanks to Eric De La Cruz Lugo and the rest of the Mexican Spanish team.

7 Mailing Lists

The BSD Certification Group mailing list currently has 812 subscribers. And the announcements list has 126 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/.

8 Website Statistics Report and Analysis

By Patrick Tracanelli

In November, we had 5340 different visitors, which is a lot lower (around 40%) than October, but still on the usual average. 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. In October, this new average, 6500 visitors, was surpassed around 25%, getting to 8203 visitors, and now is back to approximately 5000-6500. In November, we had 72840 website hits, while our average on the last months (average raised by October) is approximately 75000 hits average.

It averages in November about 163 visitors a day, and about 16 Mbytes of data transfered in a daily basis (our record, from July is approximately 220 Mb).

On November 1st and 2nd, we reached the month's top access, counting 480 visitors each, and 140843 Kbytes transferred. It is certainly a reflection of the end of October.

We still have our main access period between 10 and 18 hours. This eight hour period is responsible for approximately 79% of all our visits in November, 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 is still a well accessed URL in October and now in November. The BSD Associate PDF release from October also counts as one of the most accessed URLs in November, 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 three months.

The top ten accessed pages are:

1  14.22% 1.29%  /

2  13.83% 6.66%  /error.html

3  2.06%  42.82% /downloads/pr_20051031_usage_survey_en_en.pdf

4  2.03%  0.01%  /robots.txt

5  0.75%  17.35% /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

6  0.43%  7.95%  /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

7  0.15%  0.29%  /downloads/brochure8.pdf

8  0.13%  0.02%  /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

9  0.12%  6.16%  /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

10 0.08%  0.27%  /downloads/20051027_BSDA_command_reference_en-en.pdf

Top 5 URL by Kbytes

In November, our top URL regarding data transfer rate are mostly related to the Usage Survey and the BSD Associate exam document, which, together with the Roadmap are the most downloaded files this month, just like in October.

#       Kbytes  URL

1       415129  42.82%  /downloads/pr_20051031_usage_survey_en_en.pdf

2       127164  17.35%  /downloads/pr_20051005_certreq_bsda_en_en.pdf

3       69940   7.95%   /downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf

4       63433   6.66%   /

5       60963   6.16%   /downloads/sr1_links.pdf

Top 10 Entry Pages

In November, the front webpage is again the main entry page, followed by the error pages, the news tab and the English Usage Survey.

#       Hits    Visits  URL

1       5038    1383    /

2       5183    1040    /error.html

3       1       47      /news.htm

4       47      33      /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_en_en.html

5       20      20      /downloads/NewsMay05Rev7.html

6       4       4       /downloads/pr-jta-20050720.html

7       4       2       /downloads/JuneNewsletter.html

8       2       2       /downloads/pr_20050912_usage_survey_pt_pt.html

9       21      2       /scripts/contactresults.shtml

10      1       1       /downloads/BSDCertSurvey01_de-de_ann.html

The error.html error page is mostly due to website restructuring.

Top Referrals

In November, our top referrers are a set of websites which usually show up as the top referrers for all months. Richard's Tao Security blog is the number one site which attracts visitors to us, followed by some from China, especially http://blog.china-pub.com and FreeBSDChina.org. The later is Slashdot. Together they make the Top 10. See the Top 30 Referrals sites so you can have idea on who follows Richard's, Slashdot and the two China sites closely:

1       2955    http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/

2       959     http://blog.china-pub.com/more.asp

3       863     http://blog.china-pub.com/blog.asp

4       453     http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/viewtopic.php

5       350     http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/topic_25962.html

6       195     http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl

7       192     http://www.bsdcertification.org

8       188     http://taosecurity.blogspot.com

9       162     http://bsd.slashdot.org/

10      107     http://www.taosecurity.blogspot.com/

11      101     http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display

12      88      http://know.mitretek.org/MySite/default.aspx

13      81      http://lair.moria.org/planet/security/

14      79      http://gcu-squad.org/

15      78      http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_...

16      77      http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/05/09/18/1743239.shtml

17      71      http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/news

18      61      http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_...

19      55      http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_..

20      46      http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/topic_26414.html

21      44      http://dormrf.free.fr/rss/fr/index.php

22      44      http://www.monkey.org/~jose/secblogs.html

23      42      http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_...

24      41      http://www.gcu-squad.org/

25      37      http://www.hup.hu/modules.php

26      35      http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_...

27      34      http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_...

28      33      http://www.bsdguru.org/

29      33      http://www.freebsdchina.org/forum/topic_21870.html

30      33      http://www.google.com/search

About Browsers / User Agents

Just like October, Mozilla family of web browsers are still the most used navigation applications that people use to visit us, which count over 56% of total visits. Most visits using a 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 (25%) and Mac OS X (7,2%) represent approximately 31% 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 18430 hits in November. No videogames refrigerators have reached us in November, but we had 130 hits from Mobile Telephones (our record on this kind of equipment). Forty-six were Siemens and 71 were Treo (probably the same user always).

Geo (countries) Statistics on Visitors

Thirty-eight percent of our visits were from US in August, while about 17% could not be resolved. Among those resolved, Germany, Brazil, Poland, France and Italy follow the top listing of countries which visits us most often - all countries which do not natively speak English. Germany and Brazil had their top access on the first ten days of November while all others have balanced hits along the whole month.

Here you can follow the top thirty countries/regions which visited us in November.

#       Hits    Country/Location

1       15807   Network

2       7238    Unresolved/Unknown

3       3793    US Commercial

4       812     Germany

5       761     Brazil

6       616     Poland

7       512     France

8       474     Italy

9       459     Canada

10      439     Non-Profit Organization

11      377     Netherlands

12      371     Mexico

13      364     US Educational

14      338     Romania

15      329     US Government

16      314     Japan

17      278     Sweden

18      273     Australia

19      228     Russian Federation

20      186     Taiwan

21      170     United Kingdom

22      160     Ukraine

23      155     Hungary

24      150     Belgium

25      138     India

26      127     US Military

27      114     Denmark

28      113     Greece

29      76      Finland

30      73      Estonia

Search expressions

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

#       Hits    Search Expression

1       45      bsd certification

2       29      project org chart

3       28      BSD Certification

4       27      bsd

5       18      free brazilian portuguese exams in PDF

9 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, Siju George, Jonathan Drews, 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 2005-12-14




























































































































































































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