Homework 3

Due: 4/28/2014

In this homework, we will learn how to perform a large-scale survey of a network.

Sometimes we may need to understand what servers (and versions) different systems or websites use for security study, market research, or industry report. Lets try to find out what web servers are used by the most popular websites in the world.

The first step is finding the list of the most popular sites. Fortunately, Alexa provides a list of top-1m sites at this URL:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip

We will do four sets of measurements, where each measurement has 100 websites.

Set 1: Top-100 websites
Set 2: Top-100 .org websites
Set 3: Top-100 US .gov websites
Set 4: Top-100 foreign websites

Questions:

1. What servers are most popular in each set?
2. Compare the server distribution across the sets. What may account for this difference?

Submission: In addition to the answers to the questions above, please submit any code you wrote and no more than half page description of how you performed the measurements and any limitations of your methodology in a single PDF.