you've introduced the equivalent of a hash collision

I think he was hoping to convert his filenames to 3 digits per octet in order to avoid that exact problem. Of course, removing the dots first won't work. And I don't understand why he'd remove the dots to "change it to a proper filename". An IP would make a fine filename, I'd think.

Shrug. As others have pointed out, this isn't likely to be an effective approach to his problem anyway because a requestor's IP can change from request to request and an IP may be shared among many requestors.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";