File objects? - under the hood question

[EP]

> My brain-teaser:  What I'd like to do is read the last ~2K of a large 
> number of large files on arbitrary servers across the net, without 
> having to read each file from the beginning (which would be slow and 
> resource inefficient)...
> 

Proper googling would have revealed that HTTP 1.1 includes a Range Request.  My bad.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

Before I reinvent the wheel (and make it a little squarer than it has to be) has anyone seen a "cookbook" recipe for adding the HTTP 1.1 range request to a urllib urlopener (or something similar)?