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87M Hosts on the Internet?
NTT writes "The Telcordia Internet Sizer provides daily updates on the size of the Internet. The Telcordia solution to quantifying Internet growth statistics is based on an internally developed unique sampling method. In this approach, over 150,000 randomly generated IP addresses are sampled on a daily basis and checked for their existence. Check out the other stats they have here"
There are many instances where internal hosts (that is, those behind a firewall) have real registered address space addresses. RFC 1918 addresses are nice, but not even close to every company uses them, even for their internal network.
Also, this test doesn't really consider network address translated addresses with public DNS entries. For example, suppose I have an address for www.mydomain.com with my own authoratative domain server. The address is, say, 172.16.1.1 and anyone can connect to it. However, I actually have my firewall round robin the requests for that address to my web farm of 10 machines, 192.168.1.1-10, none of which are in external DNS. The survey would only catch one address, which actually has *no* machine directly associated with it. DNS is a reasonable measure of the size of the internet, but it is hardly an authoritative one.
This isn't even counting DMZ machines (those external to firewalls) that are connected to the internet "directly", but don't have a DNS entry. Why would you want a machine like that? Well, how about IP addresses on routers? Would you want those in DNS? How about intrusion detection servers, which monitor incoming traffic for attempted break ins. You really want to make yourself publicly known, making it easier for script kiddies to find you?
A better test would be an aggragate test of DNS reverse resolution, ping & traceroute. I'm sure that there are many machines out there that are open to some of these but not all three.
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
I'm always curious as to why people are interested in the size of the internet. As long as it works, and people think it's running nicely, does it really matter? I can't see any competitors to the internet for various institutions to be battling down, so I'm assuming that these reports are issued as nothing more than a cheap way to get some hits on reporter's website and to raise their meagre profile a little.
;-)
But then, I've always been cynical like that.
Thoughts?
Hell, that means we can put off IPv6 for another 20 years or so, right? :)
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
My sister says she has the internet on her iMac, which has only got a 6 gig HD, so how the hell could it be growing if she's never upgraded?
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
This only measures how many hosts are listed within DNS, not the total number of machines on the internet. It doesn't measure IPs used by dialups, machines behind firewalls, IP masquaraded machines, etc. In other words, there are more than 87 million computers on the internet, quite a few more I would guess. In fact, I would say that the exact number is almost impossible to figure out.