This is a very small war story.

I've spent part of today working on generating some reports from our IPtraffic accounting system. We have multiple internal networks that getNAT'd out different gateways, and what we want is a report (or a set ofreports) of the topindividual traffic sources for each gateway that did more than a certainamount of aggregate traffic in the day.

Our traffic accounting data is held in a PostgreSQL database. Since atypical day has around six to eight million records

When you write code that deals with IPv4 addresses, every so oftenyou wind up in situations where you want to convert addresses inconventional text form to unsigned 32-bit integers and manipulatethem in various ways (and then convert the results back to normalnotation). This is something I've been dealing with recently , so I've been working on this today.

Python doesn't have any standard library functions that directly dothese conversions. You can write your own code for this (but