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Netcraft: Red Hat Still Top Linux Server Distro

Posted by timothy on from the playing-with-numbers dept.

darthcamaro writes "Looks like Red Hat is still the #1 distro according to Netcraft stats cited by Internetnews.com. Gentoo is now the fastest growing, replaced Debian which was the fastest growing distro just six months ago...and as we all know, and as the article rightly points out, the stats aren't accurate cause most webserver admins disable version reporting...right? So if all version were known, what would be the #1 distro for hosting? Read the Netcraft stats (without the context that they're BS) here"

2 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Red Hat internationally by davejenkins · · Score: 5, Informative

    Red Hat, as we all know, dominates the US market. SuSE used to have a strong hold on Germany, and I think momentum is taking them through that to some degree. Mandrake seems to have plucked the right strings with the French Govt (major buys lately) and they will see some domestic growth there.

    Asia is still wide open: Red Hat is the only real distro around, but their execution is leaving a lot to be desired. SuSE just isn't here, and Turbo, Miracle, Red Flag are such odd little operations that they cannot seem to gain any marketshare.

    I would think that the place things get interesting is where the race between IBM and HP in the developing world (Indonesia, Malaysia, Middle East, India) brings a linux with them. Increasingly, IBM is bringing SuSE with them, while HP signs deals with whatever local distro is the flavour of the day (Turbo in Japan and China, Red Flag in China, ? in Korea).

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    davejenkins.com |

  2. And how would they determine distro? by bigberk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Linux is the kernel, and the TCP/IP stack is in the kernel. So you can't tell from a TCP/IP connection whether a host is running Redhat, Slackware or Debian.

    What the survey site is probably doing is looking at information tags within the Server: field of the HTTP response headers. Redhat does advertise itself there in the vendor-supplied Apache packages, but some other distros don't. Slackware's Apache packages will return nothing more descriptive than 'Unix' in the Server string.

    So not all distros will reveal themselves, and anybody can easily prevent this information from being shown period with a simple Apache configuration directive. I think that's a good idea to do on your own servers, by the way. Give attackers the least info possible at your setup.