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Category: Internet

New SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt

LoneStar 0 Comments
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httpsBetween yesterday and today I changed the SSL certificate used on the websites of lonestar.it and unixportal.net, and for the SMTP / IMAP mail services of mail.lonestar.it.

Up to now I used a wildcard certificate, regularly purchased on StartSSL . It was a cost-effective service to get a 2-year wildcard certificate. The convenience is that the certificate was valid for * .lonestar.it, and therefore in any network service.

But the StartSSL Certification Authority has been deprecated by major browsers because of some irregularities committed after acquisition by a Chinese company.

As a result, as of recent versions of Firefox and Chrome, certificates issued by this authority are no longer accepted as valid (green color next to the url bar), but are shown as unrecognized (red color next to the url bar).

So I’ve decided to start using the free service of Let’s Encrypt , which has been very successful lately thanks to the new philosophy of free release of certificates to anyone, for a short time (90 days maximum), so as to encourage adoption of https and tls protocols by everyone.

The short duration of certificates implies the transition to an automatic renewal and replacement mechanism, compared to the previous habit of obtaining a valid certificate for a few years and then install it manually on the various servers involved.

Let’s Encrypt offers an official python-based client to perform these automated tasks on the most popular distributions and common services. But since I use Slackware as distribution and s/qmail as a mail service, I preferred to use the Dehydrated script, which is based on bash and curl.

So I’ve set up some scripts that request certificates, no longer wildcard but individual for each service, and install them where necessary.

All seems to be working 🙂

is OpenSource forgetting Linux?

LoneStar 0 Comments
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I happen to notice more and more opensource projects, even big ones, presenting their products with screenshots taken on Windows or Mac OS X. Have you noticed this too?

Not only the presentation, but often features and innovations are primarily developed on Windows/Mac ports of the product, and secondarily brought to the Linux version (if ever).

I recall Firefox. It’s widely obvious that all Firefox’s development happens mainly on the Windows version, then on Mac version, and at last on Linux version. Just browsing the website is enough to see a quantity of images taken on Windows or Mac.

I have my reservations about this, also because I think things are on the opposite side, meaning that I find desktop aestetics on Linux – especially with KDE4 – are so widely superior to those on Windows and Mac that it’s not even worth comparing them. And I’m saying this being also a Windows7 user, and being surrounded by many Mac users (sic!).

Some months ago rumored news came out on music player Songbird, an Opensource project of fame that’s been born on Linux – dropping Linux support to focus only on Windows and Mac environments, and giving the reason of it in the fact that most of developers and users mainly use these environments.

I’m not saying there’s a lack of applications or a developers’ departure syndrome on Linux, because there’s an obvious amont of software, forks, different implementations, etc., but still it all seems quite strange to me.

I consider it “natural” for an OpenSource project having its main focus on Linux, or *BSD – even if this means a whole different kind of licenses. Versions on Mac and Windows are ok but they shouls always come second!

Everybody seems to have forgotten when, only ten years ago, we were predicting the success of Linux as main desktop environment, and they all seem setted on a pacific coexistence playing the token role, having Windows and Mac as protagonists.

OpenSim and virtual eviction

LoneStar 0 Comments
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I’ve been hanging out in Second Life for more than 3 years, and I’ve been living for almost two years in a virtual land area (parcel) locate in a “sim” named Feted. This sim, a 65536 virtual square meters region, belongs to an estate company named Dreamland, which belongs to Anshe Chung Studios. Anshe Chung is a Second Life avatar, a chinese woman who has become quite popular, being even interviewed on BusinessWeek, for becoming extremely rich with estate trading within Second Life, buying and reselling or renting land.

I bought this land from a previous owner. She had had a SL architect, named after the famous dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, build a custom house, which is the one you can see in my screenshots galleries.

Few days ago I received a note from Dreamland staff informing me that I had to look for some other parcel to stay, because Feted sim is going to be “converted and relocated” within their redesign project that’s gonna start shortly after Nov, 30. This is not much clear, but I presume they intend to use some contiguous sims to form some new hood or island or continent.

The event would not be tragic in a normal situation, it’s quite usual in SL to move from a parcel to another, and it’s a chance for users to build a brand new house. Most of SL users lives in prefab houses, which are easy to box and moved somewhere else, and which costs are so low that no one bothers if they should be deleted.

My situation is different because it’s a unique project, formed by many custom made items not on sale within SL and not available to anyone else. Furthermore, the whole parcel has been modeled (in SL we say “terraformed”) to fit the house, creating gorgeous views outside from the windows and amusing effects at sunset and sunrise. All this is almost impossible to move somewhere else, because you need to be estate owner to be enabled to export terrain setup to a file that can be imported in another parcel, and I’m just a tenant. I’ve asked Dreamland staff about this but haven’t replied and I think they won’t give any help.

This made me start an ambitious project: cloning the whole house, its content and the surrounding landscape to a private sim of my own, run on my home server. This is possible thanks to the open souce projects aiming to emulate SL enviroment. Specifically the OpenSim project supports a sim on a Linux machine with MySQL database and Mono, the .Net Framework porting to Linux.

For the cloning I’m using a software called Copybot, which has created rumors and outrage in SL’s business oriented world, because it allows to copy any object made by others without buing it and without being authorized. Anyway in my situation this was the only way to clone some of the house items that the architect forgot to transfer when he completed the building operations.

At the moment the project is going fast and I presume it will be done before Nov, 30. The most difficult part will be recreating the terrain setup. Unfortunately I will have to do it by hand relying on various screenshots of the original area. When all will be done, I will have a full identical copy of the house and its content located in a sim of my own, managed on my server and totally independent from SL and its central databases, but still reachable from outside by authorized people using the standard SL client or one of various Open Source modified versions

Facebook

LoneStar 0 Comments
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In these days I’m trying FaceBook, one the currently more popular social network websites.

It’s surely way better than MySpace, which success I really can’t explain, being such an ugly, bloated and unusable site, full of annoying pop-ups, messed themes and silly music at every step.

FaceBook offers the most obvious social functions, like sharing photo albums, messaging, browsing by similar tastes or nearby locations, and also a whole set of applications which interact with other external social network websites, actually bringing them into FB. Furthermore, there is a wide choice of games and amusements that you can use together with your friends.

It’s interesting to notice that you can find and interact people only if you already know their name or their mail address, so ideally only those already knowing you in some way may trace and find you. Also, the website guidelines state that you should use your real name and your real data, even if it’s quite easy to fake a believable AKA that can pass their checks.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .