One of the common questions we get is how many installs are out there. While we don’t have any means of definitively knowing, we do have one metric that can be counted. Each month every system updates its IPv4 bogons list once, pulling from one of our servers. By counting the number of unique public IPs using FreeBSD’s fetch to pull that file within one calendar month, we know how many live installs are out there that have Internet connectivity at least.

October 2011 is the first month that number has exceeded 100,000, with a total of 103,137. We’re adding 3000 net new installs on average every month in 2011, with over 4000 additional installs in October.

This under-counts the total for several reasons:

  1. Only versions from November 2008 and newer pull this file from our servers, so it does not include older versions. While I expect the vast majority are on newer versions than that, we routinely encounter systems running versions that old and much older.
  2. Some systems do not have DNS configured and hence cannot fetch the update.
  3. Some systems are on private internal networks that cannot reach the Internet.
  4. Some networks have multiple systems that go out from a single public IP, which we only count once.

No telling how many total installs are actually out there, but it’s definitely in excess of 103,000.

Thanks to all our users for helping us reach this significant milestone!