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Squirrelmail vs Roundcube

For some years I’ve had SquirrelMail running on one of my servers for the people who like such things. It seems that the upstream support for SquirrelMail has ended (according to the SquirrelMail Wikipedia page there will be no new releases just Subversion updates to fix bugs). One problem with SquirrelMail that seems unlikely to […]

Google and Certbot (Letsencrypt)

Like most people I use Certbot AKA Letsencrypt to create SSL certificates for my sites. It’s a great service, very easy to use and it generally works well.

Recently the server running www.coker.com.au among other domains couldn’t get a certbot certificate renewed, here’s the error message:

Failed authorization procedure. mail.gw90.de (http-01): urn:acme:error:unauthorized :: The client […]

Forking Mon and DKIM with Mailing Lists

I have forked the “Mon” network/server monitoring system. Here is a link to the new project page [1]. There hasn’t been an upstream release since 2010 and I think we need more frequent releases than that. I plan to merge as many useful monitoring scripts as possible and support them well. All Perl scripts will […]

802.1x Authentication on Debian

I recently had to setup some Linux workstations with 802.1x authentication (described as “Ethernet authentication”) to connect to a smart switch. The most useful web site I found was the Ubuntu help site about 802.1x Authentication [1]. But it didn’t describe exactly what I needed so I’m writing a more concise explanation.

The first thing […]

Google mod_pagespeed

I’ve just downloaded and installed the Debian AMD64 package of the Google Apache Pagespeed module [1].

To see if it worked I used the Google PageSpeed insights tool which gave my blog a rating of 93% (and 88% for mobile) [2].

After installing mod_pagespeed I received the same scores. So it appears that Pagespeed isn’t […]

Server Use Per Person

I’ve just read Diego’s response to an ill-informed NYT article about data-center power efficiency [1]. This makes me wonder, how much server use does each person have?

Google

Almost everyone uses Google, most of us use it a lot. The main Google product is also probably the most demanding, their search engine.

In a typical […]

Changing Phone Prices in Australia

18 months ago when I signed up with Virgin Mobile [1] the data transfer quotas were 200MB on the $29 per month plan and 1.5G on the $39 per month plan. About 4 months ago when I checked the prices the amounts of data had gone up on the same plans (2.25G for $39 per […]

What I REALLY Want from the NBN

Generally I haven’t had a positive attitude towards the NBN. It doesn’t seem likely to fulfill the claims of commercial success and would be a really bad thing to privatise anyway. Also it hasn’t seemed to offer any great benefits either. The claim that it will enable lots of new technical developments which we can’t […]

The Most Important things for running a Reliable Internet Service

One of my clients is currently investigating new hosting arrangements. It’s a bit of a complex process because there are lots of architectural issues relating to things such as the storage and backup of some terabytes of data and some serious computation on the data. Among other options we are considering cheap servers in the […]

Good Riddance to Flash

The Age reports that Adobe has ceased development of Flash for mobile systems [1]. This is described as leading to an improvement in the web experience for iPhone and iPad users, but the more important thing is that it will improve the experience for everyone. The Flash plugin has always been a resource hog and […]