Entries tagged moving

Relocation

We're about three months away from relocating from Edinburgh to Newcastle and some of the immediate panic has worn off.

We've sold our sofa, our spare sofa, etc, etc. We've bought a used dining-table, chairs, and a small sofa, etc. We need to populate the second-bedroom as an actual bedroom, do some painting, & etc, but things are slowly getting done.

I've registered myself as a landlord with the city council, so that I can rent the flat out without getting into trouble, and I'm in the process of discussing the income possibilities with a couple of agencies.

We're still unsure of precisely which hospital, from the many choices, in Newcastle my wife will be stationed at. That's frustrating because she could be in the city proper, or outside it. So we need to know before we can find a place to rent there.

Anyway moving? It'll be annoying, but we're making progress. Plus, how hard can it be?

VLAN Expansion

I previously had a /28 assigned for my own use, now I've doubled that to a /27 which gives me the ability to create more virtual machines and run some SSL on some websites.

Using SNI I've actually got the ability to run SSL almost all sites. So I configured myself as a CA and generated a bunch of certificates for myself. (Annoyingly few tutorials on running a CA mentioned SNI so it took a few attempts to get the SAN working. But once I got the hang of it it was simple enough.)

So if you have my certificate authority file installed you can browse many, many of my interesting websites over SSL.

SSL

I run a number of servers behind a reverse-proxy. At the moment the back-end is lighttpd. Now that I have SSL setup the incoming requests hit the proxy, get routed to lighttpd and all is well. Mostly.

However redirections break. A request for:

• https://lumail.org/docs

Gets rewritten to:

• http://lumail.org/docs/

That is because lighttpd generates the redirection and it only sees the HTTP connection. It seems there is mod_extforward which should allow the server to be aware of the SSL - but it doesn't do so in a useful fashion.

So right now most of my sites are SSL-enabled, but sometimes they'll flip to naked and unprotected. Annoying.

I don't yet have a solution..

Tags: ca, edinburgh, moving, newcastle, relocation, ssl | 5 comments

I've spent the past days updating several of my websites to be "responsive". Mostly that means I open the site in firefox then press Ctrl-alt-m to switch to mobile-view. Once I have the mobile-view I then fix the site to look good in small small space.

Because my general design skills are poor I've been fixing most sites by moving to bootstrap, and ensuring that I don't use headers/footers that are fixed-position.

Beyond the fixes to appearances I've also started rationalizing the domains, migrating content across to new homes. I've got a provisional theme setup at steve.fi, and I've moved my blog over there too.

The plan for blog-migration went well:

• Setup a redirect to from https://blog.steve.org.uk to https://blog.steve.fi/
• Replace the old feed with a CGI script which outputs one post a day, telling visitors to update their feed.
  • This just generates one post, but the UUID of the post has the current date in it. That means it will always be fresh, and always be visible.
• Updated the template/layout on the new site to use bootstrap.

The plan was originally to setup a HTTP-redirect, but I realized that this would mean I'd need to keep the redirect in-place forever, as visitors would have no incentive to fix their links, or update their feeds.

By adding the fake-RSS-feed, pointing to the new location, I am able to assume that eventually people will update, and I can drop the dns record for blog.steve.org.uk entirely - Already google seems to have updated its spidering and searching shows the new domain already.

Tags: domains, moving | 2 comments