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Reverse proxy and SSO

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Nginx logoIn recent times I have made some technological changes to the LoneStar Network services, which are not directly visible but which have improved and made them safer. In particular, I proceeded to place all websites behind nginx reverse proxy. In this way, therefore, the various web servers that present the services are not directly exposed to the network but are located behind the barrier constituted by the reverse proxy.

This also added some flexibility in being able to add subservices presented as subfolders of the main sites.

I have also added a Single Sign On service, to allow access with a centralized account. Not all the services I use support it yet, but over time it should become the only login system.

Memories of FidoNet

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Giorgio Rutigliano has recently made available a website dedicated to FidoNet Italia.

[wiki base=”Wikipedia EN”]FidoNet[/wiki] is the amateur telematic network that was born and spread worldwide between the 80s and the early 2000s, before the Internet was widely available and accessible. It was based on the use of analog modems connected to normal voice telephone lines and on asynchronous communications, that is, sending a message took hours / days to arrive at its destination and the same amount of time needed for replies to return to the sender.

I was part of FidoNet Italia, as a member node, from around 1989 until 1996/97. I came out not so much for the legal problems connected to Fidobust, but rather because the passion for real-time communications represented by chats, IRC, Videotel grew in me and I had less and less interest in leaving my PC dedicated to the BBS.

It must be said that the FidoNet worldwide network has never ceased to exist in all these years. Membership has decreased a lot but a certain number of nodes have always remained active, especially in countries where it has also become a vehicle for political activism.

Recently in Italy there has been a flashback for Fidonet and the BBS, even if limited to old users and Sysop who still have memories of the past, and some nodes are returning to be operational on the network using the internet as transport instead of the old lines telephone.

I have not yet seriously considered the idea of ​​being able to go back online, but maybe who knows …

Restyling the website

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As you can notice I’m working on the restyling of the website, a thing that I should have done many years ago.

The wordpress theme Revolution Code Blue that I’ve been using until now hasn’t been updated anymore since the early 2000s. It has been working nicely until the release of WordPress 5.1, but with the symultaneous upgrade to PHP 7.3 and WordPress 5.3 some issues have begun to appear in the visualization of some items in the pages.

After some research I’ve reached to the Customify theme, which allows me to build various parts of the site in the way I want instead of giving a mandatory structure. In addition, it matches well with my logo, which I had no intention to change.

The restyling of the website is not finished in full yet, but I should soon achieve the final look.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .