Bill Allombert <ballo...@debian.org> writes: > Both.
> Yesterday I received the same popcon ID 2600 times, and 4700 differents > ID were received two times and 22000 ID were received exactly once. Hm. I think that's still in the range of what could be explained by VM cloning, although the 2600 with the same ID is surprising. > I understand the need for totally identical systems, but then probably > it does not make sense for them to report to popcon. Marco's suggestion of hashing with /etc/machine-id is a good one. That file is unique per cloned VM (if the cloning is done properly), and if you hash it with the popcon ID to form a new ID, there shouldn't be any realistic chance of leaking a unique identifier for the system that might be useful for other purposes. > A related issue is that the submission time is randomized, but if 2600 > systems have identical /etc/cron.d/popularity-contest files, they will > report at the same time, causing network spikes. You could add a bit of per-run randomization to the cron job. I assume an individual report doesn't take a lot of effort to process, so even skewing that load across 10-20 seconds might be enough. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
