This week, we:

• got 15,275 messages from 261 different IP addresses.
• handled 21,183 sessions from 1,301 different IP addresses.
• received 172,030 connections from at least 42,834 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 18 connections being checked at once.

Volume is up somewhat from last week ,but not hugely. The per day volume level fluctuates significantly:

I was writing code today where I needed to turn a single backslash('\') into two backlashes ('\\') in order to quote it (so that theshell wouldn't eat it, through a combination of annoyances). Myfirst attempt was:

s = s.replace(r"\", r"\\")

To my surprise, this gave me an error, and a peculiar one: Pythonreported SyntaxError: invalid token (at the closing ')'

One of the things my earlier entry got me thinking aboutwas how differently people can see the issue of machine identity. Or, tomake it more concrete, when do you give something a new name (even ifthe name is only in your head, not related to the OS-level hostname)?

(I could try to justify it by talking about how it shows something abouthow people think about their computers, but really it's just the kindof thing that satisfies my wandering curiosity, like discussions

One of my DNS diagnostic tools is a program called nsdig ; it makesa query to all of the authoritative servers for a zone. This makesit convenient to both look for inconsistencies and see what theauthoritative servers are saying, as opposed to whatever is filteringthrough your local caching servers.

As another one of my little shell scripts , and asa practical example of how little utilities stack on top of each otherto everyone's benefit, here's nsdig and its component bits:

; cat nsdig#!