OS/Linux Distributions using Apache

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You are viewing an outdated report. The latest version of this report was published on October 1st, 2024

March 1st, 2012

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 192.168.1.1 80
Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
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: 9,806,817 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, 40,383,041 Apache servers were detected, but only 9,806,817 (24.28%) 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 February 2012
Hostname Count February 2012
% January 2012
Hostname Count January 2012
% Growth
%

Debian 2,686,895 27.40 2,684,595 27.42 -0.07

CentOS 2,628,163 26.80 2,644,811 27.01 -0.79

Ubuntu 1,166,326 11.89 1,147,330 11.72 1.49

Red Hat 1,154,625 11.77 1,151,429 11.76 0.12

Fedora 764,512 7.80 768,143 7.85 -0.63

FreeBSD 545,999 5.57 529,321 5.41 2.99

SuSE 405,416 4.13 419,756 4.29 -3.57

Windows 335,692 3.42 322,387 3.29 3.96

Darwin 23,289 0.24 23,576 0.24 -1.37

Mandriva 14,001 0.14 13,534 0.14 3.29

Gentoo 13,928 0.14 18,262 0.19 -23.85

Sun Cobalt 11,697 0.12 12,076 0.12 -3.29

Turbolinux 10,237 0.10 10,416 0.11 -1.87

IBM 10,026 0.10 10,372 0.11 -3.49

Scientific Linux 7,762 0.08 7,566 0.08 2.43

Trustix 5,349 0.05 5,435 0.06 -1.74

APMServ 5,326 0.05 5,312 0.05 0.10

Oracle 3,949 0.04 3,454 0.04 14.15

Mac OS X 3,539 0.04 3,551 0.04 -0.50

Netware 3,057 0.03 3,090 0.03 -1.22

ASPLinux 1,354 0.01 1,145 0.01 18.07

BlueQuartz 1,298 0.01 1,346 0.01 -3.72

Asianux 852 0.01 815 0.01 4.37

White Box 838 0.01 826 0.01 1.29

ALT Linux 669 0.01 679 0.01 -1.63

UnitedLinux 399 0.00 408 0.00 -2.36

OpenPKG 281 0.00 296 0.00 -5.22

rPath 247 0.00 248 0.00 -0.56

OpenVMS 236 0.00 247 0.00 -4.60

OS/2 177 0.00 184 0.00 -3.96

ClarkConnect 136 0.00 154 0.00 -11.83

iSeries 114 0.00 116 0.00 -1.88

PCLinuxOS 106 0.00 105 0.00 0.79

Yellow Dog 61 0.00 60 0.00 1.51

Miracle 49 0.00 46 0.00 6.35

OpenNA 40 0.00 41 0.00 -2.59

Aurox 28 0.00 31 0.00 -9.82

Solaris 23 0.00 11 0.00 108.76

Tao 22 0.00 21 0.00 4.60

Momonga 21 0.00 20 0.00 4.83

Lineox 19 0.00 20 0.00 -5.15

Haansoft 17 0.00 17 0.00 -0.16

Novell 9 0.00 9 0.00 -0.16

RedFlag 7 0.00 7 0.00 -0.16

EasiLiX 6 0.00 6 0.00 -0.16

OpenBSD 6 0.00 10 0.00 -40.09

Rogue Penguin 4 0.00 4 0.00 -0.16

Cygwin 4 0.00 4 0.00 -0.16

Slackware 3 0.00 4 0.00 -25.12

cAos 1 0.00 1 0.00 -0.16

StartCom 1 0.00 1 0.00 -0.16

Ark 1 0.00 1 0.00 -0.16

Reporting by Installation (Sample size: 989,893 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, 2,925,948 distinct IP Addresses hosted Apache servers, but only 989,893 (33.83%) 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 February 2012
IP Address Count February 2012
% January 2012
IP Address Count January 2012
% Growth
%

CentOS 252,252 25.48 248,059 25.16 1.30

Debian 204,625 20.67 204,733 20.76 -0.43

Ubuntu 146,595 14.81 143,933 14.60 1.46

Red Hat 130,939 13.23 132,621 13.45 -1.65

Fedora 74,407 7.52 75,679 7.67 -2.06

Windows 70,838 7.16 69,640 7.06 1.33

SuSE 48,790 4.93 49,616 5.03 -2.04

FreeBSD 39,899 4.03 39,771 4.03 -0.06

Darwin 5,480 0.55 5,615 0.57 -2.78

Mandriva 2,442 0.25 2,501 0.25 -2.73

Turbolinux 1,800 0.18 1,812 0.18 -1.04

Netware 1,793 0.18 1,838 0.19 -2.82

Scientific Linux 1,762 0.18 1,720 0.17 2.05

Sun Cobalt 1,719 0.17 1,759 0.18 -2.65

APMServ 1,201 0.12 1,384 0.14 -13.55

IBM 1,024 0.10 1,044 0.11 -2.29

Oracle 935 0.09 931 0.09 0.05

Gentoo 913 0.09 933 0.09 -2.52

BlueQuartz 307 0.03 316 0.03 -3.22

ASPLinux 300 0.03 291 0.03 2.70

Mac OS X 287 0.03 302 0.03 -5.33

Trustix 255 0.03 265 0.03 -4.14

Asianux 231 0.02 227 0.02 1.37

White Box 177 0.02 182 0.02 -3.12

OpenVMS 139 0.01 138 0.01 0.34

rPath 138 0.01 138 0.01 -0.38

UnitedLinux 109 0.01 115 0.01 -5.58

iSeries 92 0.01 94 0.01 -2.50

ALT Linux 91 0.01 94 0.01 -3.56

OpenPKG 89 0.01 91 0.01 -2.57

ClarkConnect 60 0.01 62 0.01 -3.60

OS/2 42 0.00 43 0.00 -2.70

Miracle 30 0.00 29 0.00 3.05

PCLinuxOS 29 0.00 28 0.00 3.18

OpenNA 18 0.00 18 0.00 -0.38

Aurox 13 0.00 15 0.00 -13.66

Solaris 12 0.00 9 0.00 32.82

Yellow Dog 10 0.00 9 0.00 10.69

Haansoft 9 0.00 9 0.00 -0.38

Momonga 7 0.00 6 0.00 16.22

Novell 6 0.00 7 0.00 -14.61

Tao 5 0.00 5 0.00 -0.38

Lineox 5 0.00 6 0.00 -16.99

EasiLiX 3 0.00 3 0.00 -0.38

Cygwin 3 0.00 3 0.00 -0.38

Rogue Penguin 3 0.00 3 0.00 -0.38

Slackware 2 0.00 3 0.00 -33.59

OpenBSD 2 0.00 3 0.00 -33.59

RedFlag 2 0.00 2 0.00 -0.38

cAos 1 0.00 1 0.00 -0.38

StartCom 1 0.00 1 0.00 -0.38

Ark 1 0.00 1 0.00 -0.38

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.

OS/Distribution	February 2012 Hostname Count	February 2012 %	January 2012 Hostname Count	January 2012 %	Growth %
Debian	2,686,895	27.40	2,684,595	27.42	-0.07
CentOS	2,628,163	26.80	2,644,811	27.01	-0.79
Ubuntu	1,166,326	11.89	1,147,330	11.72	1.49
Red Hat	1,154,625	11.77	1,151,429	11.76	0.12
Fedora	764,512	7.80	768,143	7.85	-0.63
FreeBSD	545,999	5.57	529,321	5.41	2.99
SuSE	405,416	4.13	419,756	4.29	-3.57
Windows	335,692	3.42	322,387	3.29	3.96
Darwin	23,289	0.24	23,576	0.24	-1.37
Mandriva	14,001	0.14	13,534	0.14	3.29
Gentoo	13,928	0.14	18,262	0.19	-23.85
Sun Cobalt	11,697	0.12	12,076	0.12	-3.29
Turbolinux	10,237	0.10	10,416	0.11	-1.87
IBM	10,026	0.10	10,372	0.11	-3.49
Scientific Linux	7,762	0.08	7,566	0.08	2.43
Trustix	5,349	0.05	5,435	0.06	-1.74
APMServ	5,326	0.05	5,312	0.05	0.10
Oracle	3,949	0.04	3,454	0.04	14.15
Mac OS X	3,539	0.04	3,551	0.04	-0.50
Netware	3,057	0.03	3,090	0.03	-1.22
ASPLinux	1,354	0.01	1,145	0.01	18.07
BlueQuartz	1,298	0.01	1,346	0.01	-3.72
Asianux	852	0.01	815	0.01	4.37
White Box	838	0.01	826	0.01	1.29
ALT Linux	669	0.01	679	0.01	-1.63
UnitedLinux	399	0.00	408	0.00	-2.36
OpenPKG	281	0.00	296	0.00	-5.22
rPath	247	0.00	248	0.00	-0.56
OpenVMS	236	0.00	247	0.00	-4.60
OS/2	177	0.00	184	0.00	-3.96
ClarkConnect	136	0.00	154	0.00	-11.83
iSeries	114	0.00	116	0.00	-1.88
PCLinuxOS	106	0.00	105	0.00	0.79
Yellow Dog	61	0.00	60	0.00	1.51
Miracle	49	0.00	46	0.00	6.35
OpenNA	40	0.00	41	0.00	-2.59
Aurox	28	0.00	31	0.00	-9.82
Solaris	23	0.00	11	0.00	108.76
Tao	22	0.00	21	0.00	4.60
Momonga	21	0.00	20	0.00	4.83
Lineox	19	0.00	20	0.00	-5.15
Haansoft	17	0.00	17	0.00	-0.16
Novell	9	0.00	9	0.00	-0.16
RedFlag	7	0.00	7	0.00	-0.16
EasiLiX	6	0.00	6	0.00	-0.16
OpenBSD	6	0.00	10	0.00	-40.09
Rogue Penguin	4	0.00	4	0.00	-0.16
Cygwin	4	0.00	4	0.00	-0.16
Slackware	3	0.00	4	0.00	-25.12
cAos	1	0.00	1	0.00	-0.16
StartCom	1	0.00	1	0.00	-0.16
Ark	1	0.00	1	0.00	-0.16

OS/Distribution	February 2012 IP Address Count	February 2012 %	January 2012 IP Address Count	January 2012 %	Growth %
CentOS	252,252	25.48	248,059	25.16	1.30
Debian	204,625	20.67	204,733	20.76	-0.43
Ubuntu	146,595	14.81	143,933	14.60	1.46
Red Hat	130,939	13.23	132,621	13.45	-1.65
Fedora	74,407	7.52	75,679	7.67	-2.06
Windows	70,838	7.16	69,640	7.06	1.33
SuSE	48,790	4.93	49,616	5.03	-2.04
FreeBSD	39,899	4.03	39,771	4.03	-0.06
Darwin	5,480	0.55	5,615	0.57	-2.78
Mandriva	2,442	0.25	2,501	0.25	-2.73
Turbolinux	1,800	0.18	1,812	0.18	-1.04
Netware	1,793	0.18	1,838	0.19	-2.82
Scientific Linux	1,762	0.18	1,720	0.17	2.05
Sun Cobalt	1,719	0.17	1,759	0.18	-2.65
APMServ	1,201	0.12	1,384	0.14	-13.55
IBM	1,024	0.10	1,044	0.11	-2.29
Oracle	935	0.09	931	0.09	0.05
Gentoo	913	0.09	933	0.09	-2.52
BlueQuartz	307	0.03	316	0.03	-3.22
ASPLinux	300	0.03	291	0.03	2.70
Mac OS X	287	0.03	302	0.03	-5.33
Trustix	255	0.03	265	0.03	-4.14
Asianux	231	0.02	227	0.02	1.37
White Box	177	0.02	182	0.02	-3.12
OpenVMS	139	0.01	138	0.01	0.34
rPath	138	0.01	138	0.01	-0.38
UnitedLinux	109	0.01	115	0.01	-5.58
iSeries	92	0.01	94	0.01	-2.50
ALT Linux	91	0.01	94	0.01	-3.56
OpenPKG	89	0.01	91	0.01	-2.57
ClarkConnect	60	0.01	62	0.01	-3.60
OS/2	42	0.00	43	0.00	-2.70
Miracle	30	0.00	29	0.00	3.05
PCLinuxOS	29	0.00	28	0.00	3.18
OpenNA	18	0.00	18	0.00	-0.38
Aurox	13	0.00	15	0.00	-13.66
Solaris	12	0.00	9	0.00	32.82
Yellow Dog	10	0.00	9	0.00	10.69
Haansoft	9	0.00	9	0.00	-0.38
Momonga	7	0.00	6	0.00	16.22
Novell	6	0.00	7	0.00	-14.61
Tao	5	0.00	5	0.00	-0.38
Lineox	5	0.00	6	0.00	-16.99
EasiLiX	3	0.00	3	0.00	-0.38
Cygwin	3	0.00	3	0.00	-0.38
Rogue Penguin	3	0.00	3	0.00	-0.38
Slackware	2	0.00	3	0.00	-33.59
OpenBSD	2	0.00	3	0.00	-33.59
RedFlag	2	0.00	2	0.00	-0.38
cAos	1	0.00	1	0.00	-0.38
StartCom	1	0.00	1	0.00	-0.38
Ark	1	0.00	1	0.00	-0.38