It is nice that Python's socket module has simple SSL support (although it has some limitations ). My grump is that it doesn't giveyou any good way of checking the identity of the server'scertificate, which is especially annoying as the SSL codedoesn't do any certificate verification.

(This matters to me because I have recently become quiteinterested in being able to verify machines by checkingthat they have a specific SSL certificate.)

What SSL objects have is .issuer( ) and

In theory I ought to be just the sort of person who has a GPG key; afterall, I'm geeky, quite aware of how easy it is to impersonate people onthe Internet, reasonably concerned about privacy, and so on. But inpractice I don't have one because I don't feel I could keep it secureenough for what people believe a digital signature implies.

As a system administrator, I get to be quite aware of all the waysthat a bad guy could attack the

Interactive VLAN configuration is done with the vconfig program. Thebasic usage is ' vconfig add eth0 6 '; this makes a new Ethernet devicecalled eth0.6 (by default; vconfig can change this, but you probablydon't want to). ' vconfig rem eth0.6 ' will then remove the VLAN.

A configured VLAN is up enough so that you can receive traffic on it. Ifall you're interested in is doing things like bridging virtual machinesonto the VLAN's