As a system administrator, I spend a bunch of my time dealing withfiles made up of lines that are composed of fields separated by somecharacter. A classical example is /etc/passwd , with colon-separatedfields. These file formats are ordered lists with named fields, whichshould sound familiar , but they don't showup as Python lists, they show up as lines of text and they want tobe output as text; that we use lists to represent them is just animplementation detail.

This

This machine had a planned twelve hour power outage today, so many ofthese statistics are really only for six days. Having said that, thisweek we:

• got 16,376 messages from 272 different IP addresses.
• handled 20,396 sessions from 1,270 different IP addresses.
• received at least 212,857 connections from at least 63943different IP addresses.
• hit a highwater of 5 connections being checked at once.

This

I moved up to ADSL recently and it's quite nice, but I miss one thingabout my old Supra modem: I've been spoiled by its luxurious front paneldisplay. The front panel of my ADSL modem is somewhat of a letdown andI've been missing information that I used to be able to get at a glance,in particular how saturated my link is.

The ADSL modem has four front-panel LEDs, all equally prominent:

Power ADSL DATA LAN

(DATA is on if the DSL

We have a number of internal networks here . One of them is a port-isolated subnet forgeneral user machines (such as Windows laptops), where the port isolationmakes sure that user machines can't talk to each other and thus can'tinfect each other. One day, an alert user on the port isolated networkreported to us that his machine was seeing packets from the outsideworld destined for a completely different machine.

(One of the cool things about working in a Computer Science departmentis that