It’s been a while since I last wrote an article, but I’ve just
published a new one on troubleshooting
networking
. It’s based on a
couple of emails I sent to a mailing list helping someone with their
networking problem. I decided to clean it up a bit and publish it. It is
mostly for finding where the problem lies, rather than fixing the issue,
but I would be grateful for any comments you have, particularly if you
think I’ve missed any obvious steps.

Sometimes you need to generate several SSL certificates, but don’t want to pay money to a Trusted Root, and self-signed certificates just won’t cut it. If you’ve ever had this dilemma, just for you, here’s an article describing how to set up your own trusted root certificate and how to import it into several common applications. If you want me to add your favourite application, feel free to email me with instructions and screenshots if appropriate.

Over the weekend, I managed to revive my main desktop machine, which
as spent the last 15 months turned off under a desk because it was
showing some odd behaviour and didn’t have time to fix it. I’ve upgraded
it to the latest sid and given it to my girlfriend to use instead of the
Windows machine she had been using. She appears to have fallen in love
with tuxpaint. 🙂

In the process of setting it up I discovered printconf, which
automatically sets up parallel and USB printers under cups. Plugged in
my printer, went to print in firefox and there was the printer. These
things just get easier and easier. Gone are the days when you spent
hours writing a printcap entry for your printer. One thing I would like
is for DBus support in CUPS so I know when the print job has finished.

Just finished writing an article on PostgreSQL
user administration
. Go read it.

Been stuck at home ill all day, so I took the opportunity to type up an
article on LDAP
basics
, which is hopefully an easy to understand introduction to
LDAP. Given the complicated subject matter, I probably failed in a
couple of places. If you find something you don’t understand, I’d love
to know so I can rewrite that section to make it clearer.

I also updated my robust
shell scripting
article to include a small section on (almost)
race-free locking in bash, using IO redirection and bash’s noclobber
option. Thanks to Ralf Wildenhues for the suggestion.

I managed to add two more sections to my article on writing
robust shell scripts
including using trap and making more atomic
changes. Had some useful feedback including making the fact that a few
small tweaks made it apply to more than just bash. Following from that
I’ve added an article about changing your bash
prompt
and how mine has
been built up over the years to something useful to me. Hopefully it’ll
give other people some ideas.