A few weeks ago I discovered that only 220 different IP addresses sentus actual email over the course of a week. This naturally raises thequestion: was this just a slow week, or is this typical? The answerturns out to be 'maybe'.

On the system I usually run my stats on, I only have logs going backabout 28 days; looking at the entire time period, there was email from443 different IP addresses. Not surprisingly, the distribution of howmuch

A while back I wrote about FutureSysadminJobs and suggested thatpeople who wanted satisfying careers as system administrators overthe long term should develop the skills to be troubleshooters. Whichbegs the question: what are those skills?

The first and most important skill is: you have to find all thisinteresting . Enjoying being a curious packrat is not entirelyrequired, but I think it helps a whole lot, especially as you'llprobably need to learn a number of things on your own time.

Other than that, based on my