Contrary to what some people would have everyone believe, Microsoft don’t screw up very often. However, when they do screw up, they seem to screw up with style.
This Christmas I was off work from 18th Dec to 28th Dec inclusive – quite a long time and also a bargain, at only 5 days of annual leave for a total of 11 days off work. It was nice to be away from a computer screen, only returning to check email and play a few games. Anyway, I digress.
There are plenty of people around who will happily slate Microsoft (sorry, that should be Micro$oft), Windoze, and Internet Exploder. The majority of these people will, unprompted, extoll the virtues of Linux.
I won’t lie, I like Microsoft. I think Windows is the best all-round family of operating systems available. And I use Internet Explorer as my default browser, even though I have Firefox and Chrome installed.
But I also run a Linux server. It is a modest beast. It has a Sempron processor, three hard disks around 200-500GB each, and about 1GB of RAM. It doesn’t need much, even though it acts as a mail server, a web server, and a DNS and network file server for my home LAN. It runs Fedora 11, which is actually quite nice.
I started using Linux with no experience, and with the help of some patience, a few good Internet resources, and good old intuition, I pretty much know what I’m doing.
About a week ago, my Internet connection started to die sporadically, at unpredictable intervals, for no apparent reason. I traced the lack of connectivity down to the DNS service on the Linux server not responding to requests, and this led me to realise that the server would not respond to any kind of request at all: SSH, HTTP, or even ping.
So imagine my surprise, when after a lot of investigation (and I really do mean a LOT of investigation) it turned out to be Samba, the service which handles network file shares.
Below are links to various RSA certificates I use. I sign my certificates as my own Certification Authority.
[pem] [crt]
Trust this certificate if you wish to implicitly trust all certificates I create. I’m not an official Certification Authority, so only trust this certificate if you trust me personally.
[pem] [crt]
This is the nikrivers.com mail server certificate, and allows you to verify that you are indeed connecting to mail.nikrivers.com rather than an imposter.
[pem] [crt]
Use this certificate to verify email that I have signed, or to encrypt email messages to be sent to me.
Bad Behavior has blocked 250 access attempts in the last 7 days.