There is only one way I know of to get free functional legitimate SSL encryption for your web server, and that’s through StartCom’s StartSSL service. You can get a free “class 1” certificate that will work out of the box in Firefox and Safari. Microsoft hasn’t added StartCom to IE, so people browsing to your site will have to specifically add StartCom’s authority certificate (instructions) (or ignore security warnings).

UPDATE: I am told as of Sept ’09, IE will include StartCom, yay! See comments for more…

Every year I have to renew my websites’ certificates, and the process is a bit clunky. Here’s a summary for next time around…

• Sign up at the site; they will issue an [S/MIME client certificate] and “install it into your browser”; make sure you keep the stupid thing backed up, it’s the ONLY WAY BACK IN to your account! Here are backup instructions from their FAQ:

  Firefox: Select "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Encryption" -> "View Certificates -> Your Certificates" and locate your certificate from the list. The certificate will be listed under StartCom Ltd. with "StartCom Free Certificate Member" as its name if this is your first one. Select the certificate and click on "Backup", choose a name for this backup file, provide a password and save it at a known location. Now you should either burn this file to a CD ROM or save it on a USB stick or smart card. Thereafter delete this file from your computer.

• Every year, request to renew your S/MIME client certificate, as it expires; back it up to a safe place
• Request to renew your domain certificate; provide a password; an ssl.key is generated
• Use openssl to create a no-password key:
  openssl rsa -in ssl.key.passphrase -out ssl.key.nopassphrase
• Grab the official StartCom certificates from https://www.startssl.com/certs/
  sub.class1.server.ca.pem
  ca.pem
• WAIT for confirmation of your certificate (you’ll get an email)
• Return to the website, log in, go to Tool Box -> Retrieve Certificate, save as ssl.crt
• Set up apache to use ’em!

  
      SSLEngine on
      SSLCertificateFile /path_to_certs/2009-2010/ssl.crt
      SSLCertificateKeyFile /path_to_certs/2009-2010/ssl.key
      SSLCertificateChainFile /path_to_certs/2009-2010/sub.class1.server.ca.pem
      SSLCACertificateFile /path_to_certs/2009-2010/ca.pem
  

That’s the basics but it should be enough to help me through annual renewal. *sigh*…

The MythTV developers are stabilizing the svn trunk at the moment. I’m building it regularly. In gentoo, do this:

sudo emerge -Davu libcdaudio

Drowning in scattered torrents and files? Get yourself organized! Here is a torrent management system for linux users that will give you…

* automatic download of torrent contents for all downloaded .torrent files
* automatic download of new .torrent files from RSS feeds
* automatic organization of content once it finishes downloading
* continuous seeding of contents during this process
* simple control of seeding of all previously downloaded content

My Forms for Portals project is a simple collection of forms to help you quickly access google, dictionary, wikipedia, imdb, maps, yellow pages, etc. from your own web pages. I’ve mentioned my portal before, hopefully the new article makes it all easily digestible (and yummy!). It’s a reaaally oldskool approach, yet still pretty useful IMHO.

And just so I’m eating my own dog food…

In my mythtv kernel configuration HOWTO, there are several kernel modules that must be re-emerged after a new kernel is installed. [ivtv] was particularly troublesome, because each version of ivtv only applied to a specific kernel version. To install a new kernel, you’d have to first make sure you could get the right version of [ivtv], typically through version-specific masking (pita), then install the kernel, then re-install [ivtv], hoping you didn’t run into any problems. So it’s a lot easier now that [ivtv] is included in the kernel – just configure it into the kernel and you’re good to go. See gentoo’s [ivtv] web page for details, it’s just starting to get documented. But gentoo packages are all good to go! Yay gentoo!