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Category Archives: Web

Matters related to the Web

More Swarm Adventures

Thursday, March 7, 2019

I recently went back to refresh my understanding of the state of Docker networking (there’s been some changes over the last few years I wanted to be sure of), and so have been working through the excellent tutorial materials they have built, and spinning off some tutorial materials of my own demonstrating automation of the […]

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Cross-Account use of AWS CLI

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

The documentation around using the AWS CLI from an AWS EC2 instance on one account to access resources in another account are not great. The information is all there, somewhere, but it’s scattered across many places and to derive what you need from those sources you have to pretty well read all the sources. Two […]

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Oh no! The certificate has expired!

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Hey kids! You know those SSL certificates you obtained and installed today? Yeah, put a reminder in your calendar right now for a week before the expiry date, so you don’t get caught out. Future you will thank you.

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OpenSSL on HighSierra

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Recently I finally got around to reading the excellent OpenSSL Cookbook from Ivan Risti? – you can grab a free copy via https://www.openssl.org/docs/ – and the first question in my mind was “what version of OpenSSL is already installed on my Mac”. A quick check showed it’s there pre-built in HighSierra in /usr/bin:

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TLS 1.3 – It’s like Christmas

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Via The Register I see that TLS 1.3 has finally rolled off the standards and committee draft assembly line. This is pretty big news, not least because we’ve been working with the current TLS 1.2 standard for almost a decade, and the defects in it have well and truly been discovered and exploited.

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Two-factor in the middle of the night

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Wherever possible I have been enabling two-factor authentication and similar protections. Not that I am paranoid, it’s just that I am paranoid. One of these I have had in play for a long time is protection on my Google account. So it’s somewhat comforting to get an unexpected SMS message from Google in the middle […]

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SSL Made Easy

Monday, August 1, 2016

Time for a shout-out to DreamHost, who have partnered with LetsEncrypt to make using SSL with this website very, very easy. DreamHost have always aimed to make many actions against the site push-button, with sensible defaults, and clear documentation, and generating and attaching the certificate was a walk in the park. I was a little surprised to […]

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A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Something I have been meaning to do for quite a time is to take up the idea of keeping PTerry’s name alive by adding the X-Clacks-Overhead header to parts of this site. Even if it is only in the overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett.

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CSS3 Oops.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Revising my resumé as part of an overall overhaul of my site, I realised that the presentation on mobile devices was not very good. Fortunately since I last did anything major, CSS3 has become widely implemented, so Media Queries are now an option for degrading onto smaller screens. To my pleasure it did (eventually) just […]

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Robots. They are coming to take your content.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

I am in the process of revising my site, and discovered for whatever reason that I had an empty robots.txt file present. I know it is only a voluntary ‘standard’, but as far as I know all the major players do respect it. As the overwhelming proportion of users use a search engine that respects […]

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