On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 11:42 AM Benjamin Berg <bberg(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi,
On Tue, 2019-01-08 at 10:49 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 08, 2019 at 04:22:39PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > > The additional information could be
> > > 10.5.124.209 - - [31/Dec/2018:09:07:21 +0000] "GET
> > >
/metalink?repo=fedora-28&arch=x86_64&uuid=<blah>&edition=<blah>
> > > HTTP/1.1" 200 62200 "-" "dnf/2.7.5"
> > If all you want to do is count, then it should be entirely
> > sufficient
> > to do it like this:
> > GET /metalink?repo=fedora-
> > 28&arch=x86_64&edition=<blah>&countme=1 HTTP/1.1
> > the first time within each one-week window and a simple
> > GET /metalink?repo=fedora-28&arch=x86_64&edition=<blah>
HTTP/1.1
> > all other times.
> > Then, sum up how many "countme=1" GET requests we get per week, and
> > you have a good count, without tracking individual clients, without
> > inventing new uuids¹.
>
> I do like this idea!
>
> And, if there's not an associated UUID, it's more comfortable to do
> "countme=2" the second week and onward -- this would make it easy to
> distinguish systems which are short-lived. (Or "countme=new" and
> "countme=ongoing" or something?)
Wouldn't it be easiest to only send the ping for machines that exist
longer than a week? All that is needed would be to suppress the ping
the first time while still storing the timestamp after which the next
ping should happen.
Knowing which machines *don't * last more than a week is still
valuable information. It helps us learn whether Fedora is being used
for quick testing environments, short-lived VMs in the cloud, etc.