March 2005 Archives

Quickstart: SSH Public Key Infrastructure

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Today has madly been about videos. Here's another set I finished at UAA. I keep SSH keys on a USB keychain and use that to access the servers I work on. No passwords over the wire and single-sign-on. Some have asked how it's done. Here is a comprehensive 7-part video tutorial on using 2 major clients with both server types.

Quickstart: SSH Public Key Infrastructure

Automatic Intranet Auth: Apache, IIS, Kerberos, and SPNEGO

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This is a quick project I whipped up at UAA on the path to an intranet subversion repository. It's just a simple demo of windows web clients, internet explorer and mozilla, taking advantage of kerberos authentication to negotiate via SPNEGO. One server is apache2+mod_auth_kerb the other is IIS 6.0. The windows media 9 videos below are insightful.

IE Video Demo

Mozilla/Firefox Video Demo

Sleepless Mailing List Created

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I've worked a mailing list into this website. People can subscribe in the box to the right and can use the subscription page to manage their subscription. It'll be a very low traffic list with only posts' titles and links.

I've already subscribed a kernel of people. My goal is to have all my family, friends, and colleagues subscribed. I'm using mailman for the mailing list. Then I used a sort of h4xx0r plugin for wordpress called update notify.

Completely off track, I added the pictures from Olivia's iPhoto collection to the chronological area. So now the random pictures draw from 6,000 pics. Some will need censorship as we go. That's part of the fun.

Crypped and zipped: lots of apache and web site power ups

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I put in a lot of time on this website and server this week. There's a whole laundry list of cool things I did. On the infrastructure level I added mod gzip and a real certificate to apache. Mod gzip compresses web pages (but not javascript, css, or images) to reduce bandwidth and load time when communicating with compliant browsers. I bought a go daddy turbo ssl cert. So, now I'm legitimately encrypted. It's the same 128bit encryption in the mathematical sense but it's cheaper in the insurance sense. It's great because now there are no stupid popups for most browsers out there (Mac IE and Safari are exceptions, but still encrypted). I'm also using the certificate to send and recieve mail securely.

My site's life in the wayback machine

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It's not really new news, but it can be a lot of fun to use the internet way back machine to look at old versions of jimweller.net. There were dark times and darker times (better). Later, they couldn't justify loading this complex page over my cable modem, neither could anybody else. Here's a better sample of that layout. Finally, I simplified, shrunk, and fonted a good version. They haven't caught my current design. I wonder if their bot does https?