This is exactly what my company does. Please see my PM to you.

P.S. Unfortunately we don't work for free. 

Yes, a true gem!! 

Has anyone heard from Oyle? How did his cancer treatment go?
His account has been inactive for nearly a year now, and this does not bode well. 

Good luck Don.

Yes, of course I use them - every day. They're used for connecting like devices as BillV mentioned and also for directly connecting PC's to the network equipment my company manufactures.

My pleasure. 

Try working your way through these; http://www.hellboundhackers.org/challenges/stegano/index.php. You'll have to register at that site first. Once you've done the challenges, I believe that you'll be able to answer your own question.

Congratulations, and enjoy your sleep while you get it.

I was joking one day with one of my colleagues that I'd like to teach my daughters TCP/IP. He said that when he has kids he'll sign them up for Linux 101 first.

Seriously though, I do (rarely) take my kids to work, and they love it. I have them organizing the labs, rolling up ethernet cables, etc. You be suprised how useful small hands and fingers can be when trying to put your hand in between some network devices in a full rack.

Perhaps you have to install Python on the box where you have the Python script. It doesn't come by default with all *NIX distros you know.

BTW, why are there Python scripts in a Ruby indexer. (FYI, I am not familiar with neither Python, Ruby nor Ferret).

Yup.  I've now also got a visa for the USA. I was supposed to go to the USA last October but I only got the visa at the end of November. Someone else went in my stead.

Hope you all enjoy the con. Maybe I'll come to one of the future ones.

It seems things that used to work have been broken. My mouse wheel didn't scroll in BT3 while in BT2 it did. I eventually managed to fix this by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf. The fix is to edit line 285 as follows;

This was on my home PC. I have not been able to test this on my work laptop as it's been sent of to IBM for fixing (mobo went crazy  ). So I'll only be able to check if this is a local issue for me when I get it back during next week. I do presume that it is dependant on what type of mouse you have, however the previous configuration just didn't work for my generic PS2 mouse.

Anyway if it's a global issue, then you can all just use the fix above.

OK, I've been messing about with the VMware version, and I've noticed some differences from the Backtrack 2 ChicagoCon VMware version;
1. When installing on VMware Workstation 5.x you get a Kernel Panic while booting the VM image. This does not occur with VMware Workstation 6.
2. The man pages work. 
3. Many of the tools have been updated and there are many new tools too, though I have not tried many of them.
4. Firefox doesn't seem to be working optimaly. I'm not sure why, though I found myself becoming frustrated trying to use it. The text didn't seem clear though the graphics for other apps seemed just fine. I'm still checking this to find the root of my irritation with this.
5. The VM NIC came configured in bridged mode while most VM NICS (including the previous version) come in NAT mode - minor gripe, but it wasted my precious time while I was raring to go with this distro.

After a bit of retrospect, I don't see how a personal firewall can be stateful. A stateful firewall should;
1. Detect packet spoofing so that you don't get packets with private IP addresses in their source arriving at your gateway.
2. Check the session state. i.e. It won't let an ACK into the network if it didn't see the SYN going out first.
3. Close sessions based on a preconfigured timeout, so that it won't allow a seemingly valid packet for a session that has been idle for many hours.

Personally I think it more practical to configure something like this at the gateway or in the DMZ than on workstations themselves.

I am not very familiar with Comodo. At home I have Zone Alarm installed on Windows, and an access list on my router. At work I sometimes (rarely) use Sygate, but not for protection, but rather for session analysis.

Back in my old job (until 2006) I used to work with commercial firewalls on a daily basis. Check Point and Fortigate were definately the best I worked with. I must admit that since then I haven't touched a firewall. 

Both. CLI is usually much more powerful and gives greater control. However sometimes it is much faster and more convenient and efficient to do certain things via the GUI.