When I was looking around the /var on my Fedora Core 5 scratchmachine to see where all the disk space was being used as part of the last entry , I was startled to discoverthat /var/log/btmp was a 100M file (and by far the largest thing in /var/log ). This was a surprise to me, because I had never heard of thefile before.

It turns out that btmp is used to record bad logins (some of youare already wincing

Recently, I've run into a situation where I have an ASCII stringrepresenting a time, expressed in UTC/GMT, and I want to convert it tothe standard Unix representation of seconds since the epoch.It turns out that there are some interesting issues involved (well,in my opinion).

Doing this for a time string in local time is a snap: time .strptime() will convert the ASCII time string to Python's version of C's structtm , and then time .

The SMTP frontend keeled over and was restarted around 6am on Tuesdaymorning, so some of the statistics are from then. Given that, thisweek we:

• got 15,257 messages from 210 different IP addresses.
• handled 17,165 sessions from 837 different IP addresses.
• received 101,830 connections from at least 26,869 different IPaddresses since Tuesday at 6am.
• hit a highwater of 7 connections being checked at once

Generally I'm not a big fan of LVM. It has a lot of moving parts, addsan extra layer of indirection, and the whole set of commands and taskshas always felt rather complex; there was too much fan dancing for theresults I'd get.

But I have a new machine to set up, and I have to say that moderndisks have really made LVM tempting. The problem is that they'vegotten so big that I no longer have any idea what I want to do