I'm curious as to figuring out an estimated number of online linux computers. This is required for a case study that I'm working on.
Since most online linuxes connect to some sort of NTP service to synchronize their clocks, one strong indicator would be the number of NTP requests per hour from time servers all around the world.
Another indicator would be to gather user-agent data from a large variety of websites and use ratios to other browsers, although this only gives us a percentage, not a quantity.
What are your toughts? Are there any other sources that could be used as estimators? Is it actually possible to retrieve some of this data?