City-to-Bay: Done.

Today was the City to Bay fun run here in Adelaide. It's been a goal of mine to do this for a while, so it's a big tick in the box to run it out on my first attempt. It's only 12kms - with most of it downhill - and while I've been doing that distance easily in training, it's another thing to actually complete the run with race number on, along with 24,000 other competitors - it's a big (psychological) deal for me.

My time of just under 65 minutes wasn't earth shattering by any means, but today was about competing with myself - proving that I could do it - and moving one step closer to the next set of goals. Only 9 months or so to a local half marathon :-)

exercise | 16 Sep 2007 | #

LinuxSA September 2007 - Air-Stream Wireless

  Hi all,

  Time for the September meeting announcement (it's next Tuesday)...

  The usual details:

   When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
           Tuesday, 18th September, 2007
   Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
           of South Australia (SSABSA)
           Boardroom (1st floor)
           60 Greenhill Road
           Wayville SA
   Cost:   FREE
   Who:    Anyone and everyone.
           No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

   Daniel Moscon and Troy Vodopivec will be doing a presentation about
   Air-Stream Wireless.  Air-Stream Wireless is a non-profit community
   group who use wireless in combination with free and open source
   technologies to deploy a Wide Area Network (WAN) that supports
   community participation, local content and communications.  Over the
   last six years the group has grown from a handful of friends to the
   largest non-profit community wireless network in Australia, covering
   several hundred square kilometres.

   Troy Vodopivec is the chairperson of Air-Stream Wireless, primary
   systems administrator and the developer of our current FreeBSD
   RouterOS and captive portal system.  Daniel Moscon is also a
   committee member with significant experience in long-distance
   wireless LAN equipment and embedded systems using OpenWRT.

  Finding the Venue and Parking:

   You can park either beneath or next to the SSABSA building.  If you
   are driving west along Greenhill road, you can turn left into the
   driveway if you are going slow enough to notice the sign and turn in
   time :-), or you can turn left at the next road, and left again to
   go along the street behind the building to access the carpark that
   way.

   If you try to enter the building from street level but the doors are
   locked, walk down the stairs and use the lift in the below-ground
   carpark.

  Pizza:

   After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
   Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

   For more information:

   Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
   Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
   Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
   IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

tech/LinuxSA | 14 Sep 2007 | #

Playing with certificates

One frustrating thing is working with digital certificates that someone else has created and deployed - and you have to pick up where they left off. I mean, with a directory of crt, ket and csr files, how do I verify which ones belong to which? and exactly what was that openssl command-line to check? It's not something I do everyday. That's what I use this blog for - to cover the overflow when my brain is full

Reverse encoding the ASCII-armored text is relatively simple:

• openssl x509 -noout -text -in webserver.crt
• openssl rsa -noout -text -in webserver.key
• openssl req -noout -text -in webserver.csr

Of course checking the modulus and public exponent sections manually is error-prone. So make it easy on yourself and check the shorter hash instead:

• openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in webserver.crt | openssl md5
• openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in webserver.key | openssl md5

And once you realise that the private key has been lost, or that the certificate has expired, you'll need to do one or both of the following to regenerate thus:

• openssl genrsa -out webserver.key 1024 to generate the key,
• openssl req -new -key webserver.key -out webserver.csr to create the certificate signing request file to ship to the certificate authority.

tech/code | 12 Sep 2007 | #