This week, we:

• got 13,932 messages from 204 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,417 sessions from 865 different IP addresses.
• received 161,727 connections from at least 52,444 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 50 connections being checked at once (hiton Friday).

This is about the same as last week ,allowing for random variation. The per day table is mostly butnot entirely flat

Yesterday I wrote about how sysadmins are overhead . One of the consequences of this is thatIT does not actually have real power. The real power accrues to thepeople who are doing the organization's work, whereas IT is just keepingthe machines dust-free.

Remembering this will make life less explosive, because the people withactual power can usually squash IT flat in thirty seconds if push comesto shove. Generally you don't want it to go that far.

(This is part of the core of

It's important to remember that system administration is prettymuch just overhead, much like the janitorial staff (but rather lessimportant; the university can run a lot longer without people tendingthe machines than without people taking out the trash).

The people who are important are those who are doing the organization'swork. The actual work of universities is research and then teachingstudents, so the people with real power here are professors (especiallyif they have grant funding ) and,paradoxically, students. (Students