GroundWork Adds BitRock Network Service to 5.3 Pre-release

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added the BitRock Network Service to GroundWork Monitor, making its debut in the GroundWork Monitor 5.3 pre-release.

The Bit Rock Network service is, to put it simply, quite cool. Upon installation, GroundWork Monitor users are asked if they’d like to sign up for the BitRock Network Service. It’s entirely voluntary and will not limit the ability to use GroundWork Monitor if you choose not to do so. But we’d encourage you to give it a try, as it provides two great core services that are a huge benefit to both GroundWork Monitor users and to GroundWork Open Source’s product planning efforts.

For the GroundWork Monitor user, the BitRock Network service will phone home on a periodic basis and notify you of any patches, updates, or technical bulletins that are available. You can then click on a link, download the patch, and install when you’re ready.

For GroundWork, the BitRock Network service reports some basic product usage data, including geographic location, Linux distribution, and the bit-level (32 vs 64) of the Linux distribution.

This might seem unimportant, but it’s far from it. One of the perpetual challenges of any open source project is getting good usage data. Before deploying BitRock, we knew how many downloads we’ve had over the years, but determining how many were deployed, in what countries they were being deployed, and what version of Linux they’re running on, has been tough.

So far, we’ve had about 15% of the 5.3 downloads phone home with data. This is what we’ve learned from the first batch of data:

• Top installation countries are the United States (35.2%), Germany (9.1%), Japan and Netherlands (tie: 4.9% each), and the United Kingdom and South Africa (tie: 4.2% each).
• Top Linux distributions installed upon are CentOS (47.1%), Debian/Ubuntu (25.3%) [a fair amount higher than we expected), SuSE (14.7%), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (4.2%), and Fedora Core (3.5%).
• 84.5% of the Linux distributions were 32 bit, while 15.4% of the installations were 64 bit.

If you have any questions about the new BitRock Network Service and how GroundWork is using it, we’d love to hear from you.