Since the last contest had such a great reception, let's do another! Attached below you'll find a packet capture taken from an interface of a Cisco router. The challenge? Tell me what day the router at 10.0.12.1 thinks it is. Simple enough, right?

Some guidelines:

• The target router has not been configured with a timezone.
• Your answer must include the calendar day, month, and year. Please use the month name to avoid confusion in the formatting of the date. For example, if the answer is today's date (it's not), you could say 17 November 2008 or Nov 17, 2008.
• The answer is reachable with the information provided.
• Entries must include a brief explanation of how you arrived at your answer; no guessing.
• One entry per person.

E-mail your entry to stretch at packetlife dot net (or use the contact form), with the word "contest" in the subject. Entries are due by 23:59 GMT Thursday, 20 Nov. The answer and contest winners will be announced in a post the following Friday. Feel free to leave comments on this post until then, but please refrain from discussing answers or giving hints.

To offer some motivation for your sleuthing, the folks at Cisco Press have generously donated three copies of Routing TCP/IP volume 1, 2nd ed. as prizes! This book by Jeff Doyle and Jennifer Carroll is considered by many to be the holy grail of internal routing protocols, and with good reason (see my review and notes from reading my own copy). Like last time, three correct entries will be chosen at random and their authors will each receive a copy.

Good luck!

Edit: Okay, this is why it's a bad idea to stay up until 3 AM so you can make a blog post. I forgot to attach the packet capture. I woke up to around 40 comments pending approval pointing this out. Sorry everyone, this definitely wasn't part of the challenge! It's now available at the link below: