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

One of the things that I really hate about modern desktop environments,specifically their graphical system administration tools, is thatthey are increasingly completely hiding their access controls andauthorization systems. I know that they have them, because theyhave some mechanism for doing various operations that require rootpermissions without bothering to ask me for the root password. Butit's become just about impossible to find them; what was once at leastvisible in PAM configurations has vanished into what I believe is atwisty mess of Kits (PackageKit,