Somewhere out there!

For a while I’ve been planning to sit down and hack the Openvpn CA scripts for internal SSL use. One of the bits holding me up was finding some decent information on subjectAltName for VHost situations.

The CAcert Wiki has all the of information one would need, particularly a Interoperability Test table with comparisons of the various methods against different browsers. The also have some script code.

Technorati Tags: ssl, subjectAltName, cacert

I’ve been looking for a good system for integrating mobile workers and seperate into a central file storage system. One option I’ve been considering is subversion/webdrive, combined with something like ViceVersa for the smart power users so they can keep a local copy. Another is iFolder, which with its subscription folders since like a very interest method for streaming file collections to users.

Currently unless you want to buy Novell Open Enterprise Server, you have to use Simple Server. Unfortunately it seems that Simple Server is only good for a private network.

Apache: Enterprise Server runs behind apache using the apache module mod_mono. Simple Server has it’s own embedded http server (which by the way doesn’t currently support SSL). You are not going to get the same performance or load handling using Simple Server.

Not quite a flexible as WebDav+SSL for external clients. Still most mobile workstations should in most cases have VPN access.
The Ubuntu Wiki has a useful guide for building the package from source, which probably applies equally well to Debian.

Technorati Tags: ifolder, webdav

From ChipLog, here is some insight into the just released VMware Server. The main points of interest being i) its based on GSX and ii) it’s free.

Technorati Tags: vmware, virtualisation

Not quite a pro-blogger yet.

Technorati Tags: value, blog

If you’ve recently update to the latest debian security release of sudo (1.6.8p7-1.3) which amongst other bugs fixes CVE-2005-4158: Insecure handling of PERLLIB PERL5LIB PERL5OPT environment vars then you’ve probably started getting errors like the following:

• E138: Can’t write viminfo file $HOME/.viminfo!
• dircolors: no SHELL environment variable, and no shell type option given

Sometimes I wish the changelogs would be clearer and maybe every so often a debconf message would save the hassle of an hours googling vim error codes. “Reverse the environment semantic by forcing users to maintain a whitelist [env.c, Bug#342948, CVE-2005-4158]” isn’t really that informative.

Anyway, the quick fix option is adding Defaults env_reset in /etc/sudoers.

Technorati Tags: debian, bugfix, sudo

Until today I hadn’t taken the time to upgrade to the latest Xen 3.0 testing. Here’s a quick note if you keep getting this error and can’t figure it out: ERROR: Xen will only load images built for Xen v3.0.

Make sure you have:

kernel /xen-3.0.gz dom0_mem=262144 com1=38400,8n1

instead of:

kernel /xen-3.0-devel.gz dom0_mem=262144 com1=38400,8n1

Technorati Tags: xen

One pink-colored tablet is made of three miracle fruit berries, Shimamura said. When people eat or lick the fruit’s red berries, any sour thing they eat or drink a minute later tastes sweet for about two hours. This is because the protein miraculin firmly binds to sweet receptor cells in a person’s tongue when sour substances are present. The protein then transmits a false message to the brain, resulting in a strong, sweet taste. Information on the tablets is available at http://www.miracle-fruit.net/.

Some commentary on the Petrodollars.

Between 1973 and 1981, Opec spent just 52 per cent of its oil revenues on imports. Today, with larger populations and undeveloped infrastructure, Opec member countries are attempting to spend productively at home rather than save abroad.

What of the remaining $125bn? An amazingly small proportion has gone into US Treasuries – just $10bn, according to official figures. However, other data suggest something in the order of another $25bn has been spent on US equities, corporate bonds and government agency debt.

Via the New Economist:

As a result of weaker job creation than usual and sluggish real wage growth, American incomes have increased much more slowly than in previous recoveries. According to Morgan Stanley, over the past four years total private-sector labour compensation has risen by only 12% in real terms, compared with an average gain of 20% over the comparable period of the previous five expansions. Without strong gains in incomes, the growth in consumer spending has to a large extent been based on increases in house prices and credit.

When house-price rises flatten off, and therefore the room for further equity withdrawal dries up, consumer spending will stumble. Given that consumer spending and residential construction have accounted for 90% of GDP growth in recent years, it is hard to see how this can occur without a sharp slowdown in the economy.

The big question is whether the rest of the world will slow too. The good news is that growth is becoming more broadly based, as demand in the euro area and Japan has been picking up, and fears about an imminent hard landing in China have faded. America kept the world going during troubled times. But now it is time for others to take the lead.

In Beware how you meddle with climate change, Robert Matthews reports on new research that highlights the complexity of environmental science.

This is not a product of trees and plants rotting, which everyone already knew was a source of methane; it is an entirely natural side-effect of plant growth that scientists had somehow missed. Yet it is by no means trivial: preliminary estimates suggest that living trees and plants account for about 10 to 30 per cent of the methane entering the atmosphere.

In fact, evidence pointing to huge holes in the science of atmospheric methane has been circulating for years. In 1998, Nature carried a study showing global increases in methane were mysteriously levelling off. Now it seems that deforestation – that bête noire of the environmentalist movement – may have helped combat the rise of this greenhouse gas.

Everyone knows fossil fuel power stations are hefty producers of CO2 and need urgently to be replaced. Yet they are now also recognised as hefty producers of aerosols – tiny particles in the atmosphere that play a key role in reflecting the sun’s heat back into space.