The World of a Penguin

In this final part we will add our own root CA certificate to Ubuntus pre-installed certificates. (Part 1 , Part 2 ) Copy your root CA certificate, that we exported in the previous part, to /usr/share/ca-certificates/. Add the file name to /etc/ca-certificates.conf and run the command: sudo update-ca-certificates Most of your services will now be able to find your root CA certificate. To bring your root CA certificate to your friends, just copy the exported root certificate-file to a USB-memory. Using your own CA you can now add support SSL to different services like CUPS, postfix(AUTH SMTP), dovecot (IMAP) etc. You can also create certificates to sign and encrypt your e-mails.

In part one of this series we created a root CA, a sub-CA and a certificate for our web site All certificates are stored in TinyCA2 s configuration. In this part we will: export the root CA:s certificate import the root CA:s certificate into Firefox export the certificate for the web site configure our web server to use the web site certificate To be able to import the root CA certificate to Firefox we must export it from TinyCA2. In the main window of TinyCA2, open the CA-menu and select Open CA. Select your root CA. Select Export CA Certificate in the toolbar, which is the second icon from the right. You may change the file name. Press Save when ready. Start Firefox, select the Edit-menu and Preferences. Click the Advanced icon and then the Encryption tab. Select View certificates and then the Authorities tab. You can see all the CA:s you trust. Click Import and select the file with your exported root certificate. You can in the Downloading Certificate window control what purpo...

A Certificate Authorities (CA) issues certificates to people and organization that gives us the possibility to know that we surf to the right web site and not a phising site. This concept can be nice to use on your private sites too, but you may not want to spend a lot of money to get a certificate for your site. Most common when one installs a web-mail server at home is using a self signed certificate. When one surf to the web-mail server from a friends computer one can not be sure that nobody listens to the traffic if one not verifies the signature of the self signed certificate. Maybe an easier and definitely a more scalable solution to this is to create ones own CA structure. When we are ready with this how to you will have installed a certificate on your web server, installed the root certificate into your Firefox, and you will have the root certificate stored on a USB-memory stick. First time you want to read your mail from a friends computer you install the root certificate f...

I am setting up my own CA (Certificate Authority) for all my services using SSL on my machines. Yesterday I wanted to import the Root-certificate into Firefox. Thats easy, if it is for a single user. Just click on the root certificate. But if you have a lot of users and computers? One do not want to force each user to do this manually. I want the root CA should be installed on each computer by the administrator and automatically work for the users. This is not possible with Firefox. The Root-CA:s certificates are compiled into the Firefox binaries and then at first start each user get its own certificate database. There are no central certificate database that Firefox looks into too. Ubuntu and Debian has a nice functionality where all CA-certs are stored in one place and then used by all well written applications, but not Firefox. I hope this will change in Firefox 3.0.

This week I got a mail from a guy that wondered about CPU-scaling on MSI S271 running Ubuntu. Since I have had a lot to do I have not had the time to answer it yet. Today I planned to answer the mail, but I can't find it. It's gone, cant be find in my gmail-box. So if you who wrote it read this, you are welcome to contact me again. The mailer had some problems to get CPU-scaling work with Ubuntu using a AMD-CPU TL-56, which is the same CPU I have. There may be more people interested in this issue. For me the CPU-scaling worked out of the box. To check the CPU-scaling add the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor to the panel. In the kernel used in Feisty and earlier Ubuntu versions there is only support to for two speeds of AMD CPU:s, full and half speed. I have read somewhere that more scaling is on its way. It would be nice if someone could confirm this. As far as I know the CPU-scaling is included in AMD Powernow-technology. I have to scripts starting in my runlevel 2, check the /et...

Is Disneys Mickey Mouse violating intellectual properties of the Scandinavian vikings? Take a look at the picture in this article . Isn't that Mickey Mouse? It was found outside Lund in south of Sweden and is from the eight century. Let's sue Disney for violating the intellectual properties of Scandinavian heritage.

When I ordered my MSI S271 I ordered it with 1GB of memory. When I bought more memory to my and my wifes cameras I also bought 1GB more to my laptop. Yesterday when the memory arrived I discovered that I not had the right Philips driver. A PH-00 screwdriver is needed. I bought one today and have now installed the extra memory in the laptop. I got a lot of help of the assembly guide from MSI. The assembly guide was a bit tricky to find since it was written for the MSI S262 (MS-1057), which is more or less the same computer as MSI S271(MS-1058). You need to go throw step 1-1 to 1-11 to expand the memory. Be very careful when you remove the keyboard in step 1-7 to 1-9, the keyboard cable is very fragile. Then you will see were to put the memory. It was covered with some aluminum foil in my computer. How to put the memory into the slot is described in step 3 in the assembly guide. The MSI S271 has two memory slots and can, according to the documentation , have 2GB of memory. The memory ty...

Today at work I found a wonderful continuous build-tool. One will often start a new build and regression test after each check in to the revision control repository. The tool I found is called Hudson . Some of the feature I have found useful are: * Reporting by e-mail or jabber when something goes wrong (or when it goes right) * Builds can start based on time or on events. * It gives you nice statistics about your build * For Java projects there are good plug-ins to get statistics about code coverage using Emma and regression testing using japex and JUnit . * It works against revision control systems * It can tag the builds, depending on the result * You can see history of build, and control when they should be purged * It's easy to install, no external needs except Java. * Hudson can be used with non Java applications too. (Hudson have support for maven, ant and shell script from the beginning.) * It looks easy to write your own plug-ins * A remote XML-API exist. * It's ope...

I don't get it. Why does so many people love Java? Okey, the language is today a quite nice programming language and there are a lot of good libraries to it. J2EE has tons of good functionality and is a nice concept. So what is it I do not understand? People say Java is platform independent. I would rather say that Java is the platform of its own. We talk a lot about virtualization today, and what are you doing when running a Java program. You use a virtual machine, if you not use programs compiled with gcj. Java have a lot of its own monitoring programs and its own memory handling. Where goes the difference between Java and an operating system? Starting a Java program requires a lot of initialization before the actual program starts to run. I have seen example of a batch software starting several times per minute. The program existed in two equal versions, one written in Java and one in Python. The Python version decreased the load of the system to 1/4 compared to the Java version...