IE Certificate Error with Signed Certificate

So, you’ve got your shiny new certificate, and your good old server. You’ve installed the certificate, chain or intermediate certificate, and all is nice and clean in FireFox, Chrome, Chromium, etc.

Then, your boss opens up his IE, and gets Certificate Error – “not issued by trusted certificate authority” and/or “issued for a different website’s address”. Of course, that’s a major pain, as IE – however bad, buggy and crappy it is – still holds majority of browsers market, as most computer users are incapable of installing a better browser.

Create User in MySQL if It Does Not Exist

MySQL does not support create user if not exists syntax as it does with create table and create procedure. This is pretty weird, as it just boils down to checking whether single row exists in the `mysql`.`user` table.

Troubles with svnserve, svn+ssh, and SSH

I encountered this today, and it took me some time to figure out what’s going on, as the behavior was so strange it shut off my reasoning.

How to Setup SVN Server on Shared Hosting

You’ve got a hosting, neat… a shared one. Now it’d be cool if you could move your subversion repositories there also. But, you can’t just daemonize svnserve or enable webdav in Apache.

SSH is the solution for you. SVN+SSH to be precise. The setup and configuration is pretty straight-forward, but there are quite a few glitches along the way.

All you’ll need for this is SSH access to the server and basic experience with the shell.

Hope this guide will help you: Setup a SVN Server on a Shared Hosting – it took me some time to get over all problems, I hope it’ll save some time to you!

Mimicking the .NET Membership in PHP

Few days ago I needed this code, but surprisingly, most of the stuff you can find on the Net is “I don’t know how”, and very scarcely you can see a code that seems to work.

Yet, it’s trivial.

Enable ssl/https in Apache

Though creating a https-enabled server with verified certificate is a pain (as it should be, otherwise all would do it), creating a self-signed certificate for https is a piece of cake.
This tutorial is for Linux, but other platforms have the steps very similar.

Simple password generators

We all need passwords all the time… Yet, according to recent studies, between 30% and 60% of people use the same password for all their accounts! See [1] [2] and more…

For those of us that do need (or better yet, do want) a good password, unique to each application – system account, encrypted partition, ssh pubkeys, server administration, etc. etc. – we need a good generator; don’t forget that simple random typing also decreases entropy!

Here are 2 simple password generators I use (easy to carry around on your flash); both of them use what is readily available on most *nix systems.
Feel free to post your favourite one in comment, so that we all can learn and prosper!

HowTo: ssh access using public key(s)

ssh is an extremely useful tool to work remotely and securely on *nix systems.
But the usual password protected access strategy is not the safest way to go; anyone can try to guess your password, use a keylogger attack, etc.

One (big) safety step above is the pubkey (identity) authentication. This uses a pair key-passphrase for remote access.

You can make your system way safer with just 3 simple steps.