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About

Often on my travels through the world of computers and system administration, I find myself looking for the answers of questions that don't appear to have answers on the Internet. This site should be a repository of those answers I've discovered so you don't have to. I hope you find the information useful.

If you have an unanswered problem, and noone else can help you and I find it interesting, maybe you can email me.

Recent Articles

Troubleshooting Networking

29 December 2006

Occasionally, you find yourself without a working network. This article is designed to guide you through the basic steps to work out what is wrong. Hopefully, from there you will be able to find out how to resolve your problem.

Using Perl's IO::Handles

19 May 2006

Perl traditionally does IO using filehandles, but these have a number of problems, least of all that they can not be treaded like normal variables and passing them to functions can be difficult. Fortunately, this being perl, there is an alternative and that is IO::Handle objects.

Installing Oracle XE on Debian

23 April 2006

Oracle recently published Debian packages, so I thought I'd have a play to see what they wrere like. In this article I explain how to install a database server and set up a client to connect to it, and the gotchas to watch out for along the way.

Becoming a X.509 Certificate Authority

8 April 2006

Normally when you configure a server to use TLS or SSL you have two choices; Either you pay someone like Verisign or Thawte to sign a certificate or you generate a self-signed certificate. However there is an alternative, which is to generate your own certificate authority or CA. This article will explain how to generate your CA and sign and revoke certificates, as well as how to get common applications to trust your CA.