Statistics on IN-ADDR.ARPA hosts

[Shane Kerr <shane@ripe.net>]

Okay, I got the list of hosts that connected to the RIPE Whois server 
on 2000-08-16, and did some checking.  

18367 unique hosts, 4441 of which had no host name

So about 24% didn't have a valid host name.  I ran the hosts without 
names through a program that called gethostbyname() and returned the 
h_errno and timed the lookup.  The results:

 176, 0.911s -> Successful lookups (meaning 4% of the original lookups 
                work now).

3908, 0.637s -> Authoritative Answer Host not found (88% seem to have 
                a working IN-ADDR server, albeit one giving incorrect 
                answers, since the hosts clearly exist).

 350, 12.25s -> Server failure (8% do NOT have a working IN-ADDR 
                server).

   7, 1.030s -> Valid name, no PTR record (???)

It looks like only 2% of the hosts in this sample have what I would 
consider a true problem - the ones with a server failure who took an 
average of 12 seconds to complete a DNS lookup.

In some sense this may be unimportant.  OTOH, if this is representative 
of the larger Internet, and if 10% of the 1.1 billion announced IP's on 
the Internet actually have an active host, then this over 2 million 
computers.  2000000 hosts * 10 seconds * 1 DNS lookup is more than 230 
days of poor schmucks waiting idly at their keyboards, wondering why 
the Internet is so damn slow.  :)

Shane