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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.

Minimalism in software development

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This is a talk held by my friend Katolaz some months ago, explaining what minimalism is and how it is relevant when developing OpenSource software.

 

New SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt

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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 🙂

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