I’d asked on this blog for hosting after Nerdfest’s demise. While some kind folks offered to pitch in free user accounts, I needed a full server as there were many web applications to run. After a lot of careful evaluation, I decided to go with The Planet for hosting. At $69/month, they provide a dedicated 2.4 GHz P4 server with 512MB RAM, 80GB disk, 750 GB bandwidth and most important of all, remote reboots and support. It’s real money and expensive for someone living in India, but all in the name of a free software company :).
FWIW, I had evaluated several options including SFCCP, Blue Linux, Jump and Server Beach. I can only say good things about the former three options and the nice people behind them, but they ended up as either expensive or not a good match. Now I have to contact them and let them know.
After about a week of moving in, things are good so far. There is no upstream firewall which is a great thing. I have moved many of Banu’s web applications and services over in the past week, and hope to finish it off this week. This website and blog have also been moved.
After the demise of Nerdfest, I was/am looking for a dedicated server setup to host projects and other assorted websites such as Graphics Planet. The trouble with popular hosts such as ServerBeach and Layered Tech is that they filter useful ports such as IRC to achieve a false sense of security. Blue Linux seems to be a great place to go to, but I’m facing trouble getting a Dell server out to them as Dell UK will only accept UK registered credit cards. Other options are far too expensive.
If any company in UK is willing to donate a used 1U rackmount server (x86 P4, 1GB RAM and 80 GB disk - or higher class), please get back to me (muks at mukund dot org). The server will be used to host free software and open media projects, and we can add a link in the footer back to any website of your choice. It will be a one-way transfer though and the server will not be returned. It will be put to good use. 
It looks like Nerdfest will be shutting down operations very soon, after a good 8 years of consistent free community hosting, because our upstream provider is going away. Yes we started in 2000! Btw, if you can provide free colo for Nerdfest (low bandwidth requirements), or can take over some of our users’ accounts, please contact me.
This is a tip for Nerdfest account holders who are unable to locate alternative hosting. Google has a free apps service which lets you host your webpages, email (including IMAP), chat, etc. for your domain. I see at least one user who has already switched partly to it. The hosting isn’t as good as rolling your own.. you host static content, and you can have a blog too. But this is better than nothing, and Google is bound to be around for a long time. Think about it.
I don’t follow the rationale behind SSL site seals, which are usually marketed as an add-on to higher-priced X.509 certificates. What is the advantage of asking a visitor apparently on your website to click on an image, and go to a 3rd party website to verify a site’s certificate? It brings a false sense of security, as users who don’t know about SSL can be fooled into visiting a dummy non-SSL webpage with the site seal.
Your web browser already verifies the CA’s signature on the presented certificate. Many popular browsers also let you view information about the Subject and the Issuer in the certificate. If the site seal was created because a certificate may have been revoked and the browser hasn’t checked that, then the same can be said for the certificate that the CA’s website hosting the site seal sends.
On the subject of SSL certificates, it is high time that Firefox added a box next to the location bar, which displays the organization (O) of the Subject DN in the X.509 certificate when visiting a website over HTTPS. Right now, hovering over the padlock displays the certificate authority that signed the certificate. A user like me would be more interested in seeing the organization that it was issued to.
I bit the bullet and updated this blog to use Wordpress, due to its fancy WYSIWYG editor thing and overall ease of use. This blog will be more or less about my work and personal life from now on.
The Hemingway theme was picked as I liked the look of John Lilly’s blog.
Last night I wrote a couple of Python scripts to create a static website tree from input XML documents, and switched this website to use it. The blog is also gone and replaced with a date-ordered journal (the title attribute seemed a bit silly). Now I can edit documents in emacs and post—which is far more nicer to use than a website form—and also put the journal in version control. Whee!
Now I hope to put some old programs such as a DOS virus cleaner written in 8086 assembly with source code on the website. Blast from the past!
Thanks to Andreas Nilsson for creating this hackergotchi for me:
Dear Interweb,
I’m requesting a datacenter hosted SSH-accessible account with about 5–10 GB of space and the rsync utility installed, so I can perform offsite backups of my projects’ code repositories, Trac environments, etc. [I already have a place to host stuff, just need something for offsite backups.] Is there anyone out there who will hook me up with the same (ideally some community place which already hosts projects)? Please send me an email. Can’t use the GMail storage utils BTW as that’ll be against their TOS and I’d like a notice before any rm -f happens 
.
I am a Firefox user. One feature I want in Firefox is the display of the Organization (O) field of an X.509 certificate when SSL is used. Firefox currently shows a yellow location bar with a lock icon to indicate that an authenticated SSL session is in use. Hovering the mouse cursor over the lock icon shows the signing certificate authority who issued the certificate. I think that people would care to see the name of organization it was issued to, more than the certificate authority’s name (as we already have a trusted list of CAs [hopefully] in our browser).
Opera has this feature and the following screenshots compare Firefox 2 Beta 2 (BonEcho) to Opera:
Firefox:
Opera:
See my name there in the Opera screenshot? Basically what it means is that the certificate which the server has was authenticated by the issuing CA to belong to a person/organization with that name, and the browser has verified it.
We are having this discussion about data collection and privacy on the web just now in #gimp.. and about things which are done for our best interest:
<mitch> Other people who have bought these books: ....
Other people who have fucked your wife: ....
Highly recommended!
This private quote was used with permission people, something you should keep in mind when you build your products and services.
Following the earlier post about tracking people using the web browser’s cache, here is an implementation of this issue.
To quickly recap, clearing your browser’s cookies is not sufficient to remove all identifying information in your browser from being sent to a website. IMHO, this is a pretty serious issue.