Bit of an odd one, but I'm writing a program to help us go through the logs our SmarterMail server produces, and I came across this 'oddity'.
In the SMTP log, each line begins with the Time, IP address, and a seemingly 'Random' number that identifies the SMTP thread when more than one is happening at once, so you know which line is related to which thread.
Anyway, I assumed these numbers were random, and hence unique, but it turns out that the numbers are periodically repeated. In a quick sample I looked at of 620,174 smtp threads, 15 numbers were repeated. This might not seem a lot, but when there are 100,000,000 possible 'random' numbers, it is hugely more than would be expected by random.
So, bit of a long shot, but does anybody have any idea if these numbers mean something? Or is it just a bug in how they are generated that is biasing some numbers more than others?
Cheers