China has a Norwegian speaking techie population

And from the looks of it, they like OpenBSD or at least PF. I can see it in my logs.

As regular readers will know (hi, all three of you), while I was attending EuroBSDCon 2006, I moved the PF tutorial's home to NUUG's server. As a consequence, I now have read access to the web server logs related to the material I have put there.

That's how I, thanks to a tiny little statistics script, know that at this moment 13022 unique IP addresses or host names have hit one or more files in the tutorial directory tree since I moved the files to this location.

It won't surprise you that I sometimes when I really should be doing other things, glance at the logs and occasionally see something interesting.

At times I see stuff like somebody at 222.76.215.122 fetching http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/no/langbrannmur.html - the Norwegian version of my PF tutorial (which is sadly behind times, unfortunately), as one long html file.

If you do a 'whois 222.76.215.122' you will see what I mean. Somebody in China is reading about how to set up PF, in Norwegian. The funny thing is that something like this happens fairly regularly.

If we can trust the whois data to be correct, this could mean several things:

1. Educated Chinese prefer to read networking literature in Norwegian over English, even when the English version is more up to date
   
2. There could be a number of Norwegian network people in China who feel better after reading about PF in their native language
   -- or --
   
3. China is so big and has so many people who are potentially interested in PF that at least a few times a week one will fetch the Norwegian version of my tutorial by accident.

I just thought I'd share it with you guys. And now it's 13026.

[and yes, there is option 4: Chinese robots, slurping away anything they can find. But the first theory is a lot more fun.]