The survey is still open as of this writing, and can be accessed at the Zoomerang survey page. Further participation is encouraged. The figures quoted in this document reflect the results at the time of writing.

The public results of the survey are available. If you complete the survey, a link to the results is provided on the thank you page.

An important note about this survey is that it has a small sample size (103 complete responses at the time of writing), so any conclusions drawn should be considered tentative.

To speculate on the overall number of users that this sample represents, the Debian popularity contest reports 478 installations of Shorewall, 285 of which are in active use. Assuming that the popularity contest represents 30% of the Debian installed base (likely ridiculously optimistic), this would make the number of active Shorewall systems approximately:

285 / 0.3 (percentage of Debian systems) / 0.26 (percentage Debian holds of all distributions) = 3654 (rounding up the numbers to the nearest whole, and assuming the percentages extrapolate regularly)

This means that our survey represents a maximum of 2.8% of the installed base, likely far less.

Additionally, since the survey was open to multiple responses, it could be that some people answered the questions about themselves more than once, despite instructions to the contrary in the introduction page.

There is an error in the released version of the survey for question 15 (RAM size): it was a multiple choice question rather than single choice, and thus there were more results than expected. The number of errors doesn't seem to be significant.

If you notice any errors in this analysis, or have any suggestions about how to improve it, please contact the author at pgear@shorewall.net.

Small organisations dominate the spectrum of Shorewall users. The largest group (44%) was 1-10 users - mostly SOHO LANs based on the comments in that section. Ninety percent (90%) of Shorewall installations are in organisations with less than 500 users. The results for the questions about organisational size and the number of users serviced by Shorewall match fairly closely, which seems to indicate that the majority of Shorewall systems are servicing the entire organisation in question.

The vast majority (84%) of Shorewall systems are administered by only one person. One question that needs to be asked is, "Why?" Possible reasons for this might be:

There doesn't seem to be an easy answer to thus question. In retrospect, since there were no responses indicating 10 or more administrators, i could have made the granularity of this question better. A question about a person's role in the organisation may also have been helpful. Possibly we could follow up with a smaller survey, specifically about the people and organisations who use Shorewall.

Unsurprisingly, 97% of survey respondents were male. Or to put it another way: surprisingly, there are actually 3 female Shorewall users. :-) Being male seems to be an occupational hazard of life in the IT industry, and even more so in the more "nerdy" specialisations like Linux and security.

The largest age group of users is 25-34 years (42% of all respondents). There were no retirees (65 and over) or minors (under 18) in the responses. The distribution of the remaining age groups was fairly even.

The largest group of users in terms of education was those with a Bachelor's degree, followed by those with a high school education. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Shorewall users have a Bachelor's degree or better. Many users' highest qualifications are not in an IT-related discipline (42%). This remains fairly constant across the spectrum when correlated with the highest level of qualifications. Those who do not claim IT as their highest discipline come from a wide variety of other fields, including agriculture, art, business, chemistry, education, various forms of engineering, law, mathematics, physics, and theology.

Almost two-thirds of users (62%) use Shorewall as part of their paid employment. Of these, 12% (7 of 58) do not use Shorewall as part of their official duties. Cross correlation with level of education revealed no major variance in this trend depending on level of education.

The majority of users (73%) began using the Internet in the 1990s. A smaller majority (61%) have been using the Internet for more than 12 years (1994 or earlier). (The single response indicating use of the Internet (then ARPANET) since the 1960s seems to be an error.)

The majority of users (70%) began using Linux after it reached a certain stage of maturity - around or after the release of kernel 2.0 (1996). However, nearly all respondents (97%) have been using Linux for 5 years or more, with almost half (47%) having 10 or more years experience with it. It seems fair to say that as a rule, Shorewall attracts people with plenty of experience.

Around one third of users (30%) have been using Shorewall for more than 5 years, with two-thirds (66%) having used it since the 1.x series (2003 or earlier). It seems fair to say that Shorewall users seem to stick with the product once they are familiar with it. On the other hand, it seems that Shorewall is not attracting large numbers of new users, which is a concern for the future of the project.

Ninety-three percent (93%) of users run Shorewall on i386 family hardware, with a further 6% running it on x86-64/EM64T platforms. One response was received indicating use of Shorewall on MIPS (Linksys WRT platform). No responses were received for any other hardware platform. While it is not surprising that Intel would be dominant, given their market share, it seems a little skewed not to have any representatives of other architectures.

A good spread of CPU power is shown in the survey responses. The largest group was 400-999 MHz (30%), with only 16% of responses indicating less than 400 MHz, and the same number greater than 2500 MHz. A number of responses in the field for additional information suggested that the machines used were either recycled desktops, or systems that were specifically built to do the job, and had been running in that role for a number of years.

RAM configuration seemed to mostly mirror CPU power, with a slight bias towards higher RAM figures. The majority (52%) of systems have between 256 and 1023 MB; only 11% of systems have less than 128 MB; 28% have 1024 MB or more. This reflects the more server-oriented workload that many Shorewall systems run (see the section on server roles below).

Shorewall systems on the whole tend toward smaller OS hard disks, with 42% having disks 39 GB or smaller. The largest group by a small margin was 80-159 GB at 23%, with 10-39 GB and 0-9 GB coming in a close second and third at 22% and 20% respectively.

The majority of Shorewall systems (82%) use between two and four network interfaces. The number of devices connected to systems closely mirrors the size of the organisations in which they are used, with 95% of systems connecting less than 500 devices, and the largest group (41%) connecting 2-10 other devices.

Ninety percent (90%) of Shorewall systems are connected to 100 Mbps or faster local networks. Most systems have a broadband Internet connection or better, with only 7% having 512 Kbps or less, and 51% having 10 Mbps or better. DSL is the most common form of Internet connection, with over half the responses (51%).

The most popular Linux distribution on which users run Shorewall is Debian (26% of respondents), followed by a group consisting of Fedora Core (16%), Red Hat 9 and earlier (13%) and Red Hat Enterprise and derivatives (12%). The next group consists of SUSE (9%), Slackware (8%), Gentoo (6%), and LEAF/Bering (5%).

The message about maintaining an up-to-date Shorewall system seems to have gotten through, with 61% of respondents running the latest stable version (3.0), and an additional 22% running the previous stable version (2.4). Only 14% of users are running unsupported older versions (2.2 and previous).

The most common roles played by Shorewall systems are:

Following is a sample of the comments we received about the survey - they have been carefully sanitised to make us look good. ;-)

I tried to do everything in one survey, and ended up confusing some people. For example, despite the fact that the survey's start page clearly says "Please answer the questions for only ONE SYSTEM running Shorewall", i received multiple comments saying that they couldn't answer accurately because they ran more than one Shorewall system.

It would have been better to have two surveys: one about the people who use Shorewall, and another about the systems they run it on. Better still would be for Shorewall to automatically collect appropriate information about systems and request permission to send it to a central location for statistical analysis. How to do this and maintain users' privacy and obtain their permission efficiently is not an easy problem with a product like Shorewall, which doesn't actually stay running on user systems, and doesn't present a user interface per se.

Within hours of the survey's release, 50% of the results were in. Within 3 days, it hit the Zoomerang basic survey limit of 100 responses. I had not planned for such an enthusiastic response, and also was too busy to download all of the results before the survey's time limit expired. Fortunately, i was able to obtain funding to allow a Zoomerang "pro" subscription to be purchased and thus provide advanced analysis, and complete downloads of the results.

The final version of this survey was released still with a few bugs. The released version was just a copy of my master survey, and i continued to maintain the master after the final survey was released (and during this analysis), and i'm sure the next version will be even better.