Today I woke up and was in a weird mood, I started to take stock of some thing while at the same time cleaning out the rfxn.com projects and downloads repo (thats a whole other story in itself). In doing so, I realized just how long I have been doing this, it sometimes gets past me just how much time has gone by since my first projects went up.
In November of 2002 I put out the first public version of System Integrity Monitor over at the then rackshack community forums, at a time when Cobalt Raq’s and bargain basement Ensim servers were still the cool thing and ProFTPd and Apache crashing every other morning was also the norm. A short time later, in March of 2003, I put up the first release of Advanced Policy Firewall, without a doubt my most popular project so far.
Here we are, a little over 7 years later and the projects are by any standard still going strong, certainly not as strong as they always were but then again 7 years ago — let alone a couple of years ago — alternatives were few and far between and now there are many projects that have derived some form of inspiration from my own and it is certainly satisfying to know people continue to find value in my work or that I have helped inspire the creations of others.
Over the years, I have moved servers many times, either because of changing employers (often my hosting is provided by my employer) or because I am just A.D.D. like that and am forever breaking things / moving things around. This has always caused a bit of an issue to grasp the actual amount of downloads the projects receive, the last time I took stock of any tangible stats was nearly 3 years ago and the projects had a yearly download rate of about 140k.
This morning I compiled some stats on the last year of project downloads as I finally do have a full year of workable stats again. I will end this post with the stats below while saying that the projects are very much alive and not going anywhere, I have some exciting things planed for the future of the projects and hope everyone can join me while I work towards getting there. Thank you to new and old users alike for always being supportive with simply downloading my work, offering feedback and most of all to everyone that has and continues to donate.
Download Stats (May 2009 – April 2010)
APF 41,374
BFD 13,643
LES 5,662
SIM 4,074
OTHER 6,073 (prm, spri etc…)
Total 70,826