[OSGeo-Discuss] [Analysis] Geospatial server deployment statistics

[Jonathan Moules]

 > Interesting so some of the 5000+ WMS services attributed to geoserver 
may be mapserver instances?

Extremely unlikely. Multiple fingerprints were used for each piece of 
software. For GeoServer I have 9 different fingerprints any one of which 
is almost always unique to GeoServer, for MapServer there are 5 
fingerprints including a unique XML namespace, and they have a 
"MapServer Version" comment too. If there was even one conflict then it 
was filed under "UNSURE" (which is mostly MapBender). I leant toward 
False Negatives over False Positives.

 > You could actually probably tell the precise version number.

I did this with GeoServer 3 years ago - 
http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/Stats-on-GeoServer-versions-as-currently-deployed-td5314686.html 
- but that was using a very different method (a custom scrape of the 
GeoServer admin websites as they have the version number explicitly on 
them: example: http://demo.geo-solutions.it/geoserver/web/).

As Jim said, this would be easy to do with MapServer too as a result of 
the "<!--MapServer Version ..." comment, but only about 40% of MapServer 
services have that comment enabled (I don't know if that's because it's 
version specific or admins can disable it).


On 2020-06-05 22:50, Even Rouault wrote:
>
> On vendredi 5 juin 2020 14:18:42 CEST Jody Garnett wrote:
>
> > Interesting so some of the 5000+ WMS services attributed to 
> geoserver may
>
> > be mapserver instances?
>
> I imagine someone with sufficient time and determination could 
> actually do much more than saying this is a Geoserver, this is a 
> Mapserver. You could actually probably tell the precise version 
> number. One advantage of being open source is that our bug trackers 
> are public too. So by looking at which bug a deployment has or not, 
> you could really refine the identification. But that would indeed be 
> time consuming and cumbersome to do. I guess only black hat hackers 
> would be interesting in that :-)
>
> But probably more easily: triggering exception situations in 
> WMS/WFS/etc protocols should help to find the implementation. Error 
> messages are really implementation specific. But maybe part of that 
> was actually done.
>
> Even
>
> -- 
>
> Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
>
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