OS/Linux Distributions using Apache

Browse:

select * from

where

Free Reports

web srvrs by domain

market share
server details

Premium Reports

ssl srvrs by domain

market share
server details
certs & CAs
protocols & ciphers

apache modules
tech penetration
web authoring tools
theft & upgrades
cookie usage
isp market share
dns load balancing
web bugs
firewalled IIS
web failure/growth
p3p compact policy
DNS site operator
CA Market Share
Web Survey by IP
OS/Linux Distros

You are viewing an outdated report published on November 1st, 2002. The latest version of this report was published on November 1st, 2008

OS/Linux Distributions using Apache

November 1st, 2002

Report Description

The Apache server has in virtually any unbiased metric available (either from us or elsewhere) a majority market share in the web server market. Couple this with the fact that Apache will often provide hints as to the nature of the host OS it is running on, and one can view trends of linux distributions, how specialty OS' are performing in the server market and so on.

Methodology

The principal is simple: when issuing a request for a page to an Apache web server, the response received consists of HTTP Response Headers as well as the body of the web page being requested. For example, consider if we connect to a host on port 80 and request the root document. Our transaction might look something like this:


telnet some.host.name 80
GET / HTTP/1.0


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:24:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) DAV/2 PHP/4.4.4-8+etch4 mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8
Last-Modified: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:01:07 GMT
ETag: "62c786-15eb-43c23eac2cec0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5611
MS-Author-Via: DAV
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">

<html>
...<snip>
</html>

The above response headers show the Server: header indicating the version of Apache, various add-on modules, as well as the fact that this platform is running the Debian linux distribution.

Reporting by Hostname (Sample size: 887,312 web sites)

It should be noted that not all web servers will report back the Host OS signature. In an Apache configuration file, the ServerTokens directive can be used to to disable the disclosure of this information. Only configurations that do not specify the ServerTokens directive, or set it to Full may reveal sufficient information to allow disclosure of the OS and distribution hosting the server.

In this month's survey, 5,305,649 Apache servers were detected, but only 887,312 (16.72%) revealed sufficient information to detect the host OS. The remainder of the survey by host information shown below is based on this subset of Apache servers that revealed the host OS.

OS/Distribution October 2002
Hostname Count October 2002
% September 2002
Hostname Count September 2002
% Growth
%

Red Hat 470,561 53.03 471,449 54.01 -1.82

Debian 133,410 15.04 130,365 14.94 0.67

Sun Cobalt 98,551 11.11 95,100 10.90 1.94

SuSE 69,934 7.88 68,616 7.86 0.26

Windows 46,173 5.20 41,889 4.80 8.43

Mandriva 23,928 2.70 22,971 2.63 2.47

Darwin 23,138 2.61 21,691 2.49 4.93

Turbolinux 4,408 0.50 4,161 0.48 4.21

Trustix 4,145 0.47 3,968 0.45 2.76

IBM 3,113 0.35 3,115 0.36 -1.69

Mac OS X 3,105 0.35 3,048 0.35 0.21

FreeBSD 2,509 0.28 2,605 0.30 -5.26

Oracle 1,669 0.19 1,531 0.18 7.24

Netware 1,124 0.13 1,018 0.12 8.61

ALT Linux 447 0.05 394 0.05 11.60

OS/2 323 0.04 325 0.04 -2.24

ASPLinux 226 0.03 248 0.03 -10.36

OpenVMS 205 0.02 184 0.02 9.60

Gentoo 169 0.02 0 0.00 N/A

Miracle 137 0.02 129 0.01 4.47

Solaris 26 0.00 36 0.00 -28.95

iSeries 5 0.00 2 0.00 145.93

Cygwin 3 0.00 3 0.00 -1.63

OpenBSD 2 0.00 2 0.00 -1.63

OpenNA 1 0.00 0 0.00 N/A

Reporting by Installation (Sample size: 215,116 IP Addresses)

The following graph and table are based on the same underlying data set as in the previous graphs and table, but with the distinction that we count unique IP addresses instead of unique hostnames, thus getting a more accurate representation of the number of actual web servers installed. (See Web Survey by IP for more details).

In this month's survey, 1,040,896 distinct IP Addresses hosted Apache servers, but only 215,116 (20.67%) revealed sufficient information to detect the host OS. The data below is based on this subset of servers that revealed the host OS.

OS/Distribution October 2002
IP Address Count October 2002
% September 2002
IP Address Count September 2002
% Growth
%

Red Hat 118,372 55.03 117,503 55.79 -1.38

Debian 24,636 11.45 23,428 11.12 2.95

Sun Cobalt 23,361 10.86 22,552 10.71 1.41

SuSE 15,550 7.23 15,437 7.33 -1.38

Windows 15,230 7.08 14,604 6.93 2.10

Mandriva 5,493 2.55 5,268 2.50 2.08

Darwin 4,159 1.93 3,749 1.78 8.61

Turbolinux 2,620 1.22 2,506 1.19 2.35

IBM 1,452 0.67 1,491 0.71 -4.66

Mac OS X 920 0.43 886 0.42 1.66

FreeBSD 798 0.37 872 0.41 -10.41

Oracle 788 0.37 736 0.35 4.82

Netware 717 0.33 642 0.30 9.34

Trustix 366 0.17 352 0.17 1.79

OS/2 138 0.06 135 0.06 0.08

OpenVMS 131 0.06 117 0.06 9.61

ALT Linux 116 0.05 103 0.05 10.26

ASPLinux 104 0.05 119 0.06 -14.44

Miracle 92 0.04 91 0.04 -1.02

Gentoo 63 0.03 0 0.00 N/A

iSeries 3 0.00 1 0.00 193.70

Cygwin 3 0.00 3 0.00 -2.10

Solaris 2 0.00 3 0.00 -34.73

OpenBSD 1 0.00 1 0.00 -2.10

OpenNA 1 0.00 0 0.00 N/A

Note: Readers are cautioned that the Growth percentages are based on a server's market share penetration rather than the absolute number of servers we detected. Thus, it is possible for the number of servers to increase, while the growth is actually a negative value.