Re: A proposal about hostcount and DNS

[Piet Beertema <]

    The current hostcount methods builds it's counting on the DNS A
    records but nowdays is there a lot of machines which is not being
    registred in DNS while they can make use of the Internet resources.
    Example of such machines may be machines behind firewalls, private
    addresses (193.168/16 and 10/8) or dial-in machines. These machines
    will not be found in the DNS and therefore will not be counted.
    In the effort of possibly make the hostcount values show more of the
    reality in some sense it would be good to get some method of collecting
    such hidden information.
I'd suggest to first pose the question what the *need* is
of a more accurate hostcount. It's good to have a rough
idea about the number of hosts, but I fail to see any use
for an *accurate* hostcount (other than perhaps for even
more unwanted "commercial interest"). And if we would come
up with even the possibility of an accurate hostcount, the
next request would be for an accurate user count...


	Piet