This blog is running on my wmbuck.net server, tarragon, in the Amazon cloud. This server, in addition to hosting this blog, hosts about 20-25 websites (for friends, most of them very low traffic), including my own. It also operates mail for myself and a few others, and provides some other services.
One of the weaknesses has been that most of the people who use the server aren’t really very unix literate, and they don’t really WANT to be. Perhaps they want a website, or they want to have a good place to manage their mail. But in general, the last thing they want is to learn how to ssh into the server to change their password.
So, for most of them, they just use whatever password I set up for them.
One of my friends, who just began using mail on the server, was surprised that it was not convenient to change his password. That spurred me to address the long standing problem. How to let people manage their password for access to services.
The blog now has a new menu on the left, for access to the backend, and for linking to the reset-password screen. There is also a reset password link on the login page https://wmbuck.net/index/login.
The same password is used for all the wmbuck.net stuff: the password for access to mail, the password to get access to protected websites in apache, and the password for logging in to the wmbuck.net backend website.
Continue reading Managing passwords on this server
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Self-inflicted disaster
The blog portion of my website is wordpress, the remainder (that the public can’t see) is php built with Zend framework. The whole thing sits upon a linux box, running fedora, which is in a facility on the other side of the nation from me. The server was 4 releases behind, hadn’t been upgraded in 2 years, and hadn’t even been rebooted in 288 days. I was hosting not only my own website, but 8-10 others for other people – friends and acquaintances who for whatever reason don’t have or can’t afford a hosting service. Obviously things were going entirely too well.
So, a few days ago I decided to upgrade to a new release of Fedora (or, put another way, I decided to shoot myself in the foot).
Learning to Fly Fish
Helped a local volunteer organization to build a website. They are Project Healing Waters – the Denver Program, and they help returning vets who have experienced some damage. They help by teaching the vets to fly fish, and organizing outings for them. If you are interested in the subject, see http://projecthealingwatersdenver.org.
As a thanks for the help, their head coordinator gave me a fly rod, and one of their other officials is giving me fly casting lessons, and has offered to take me Fly Fishing next week. I’m very excited about this. I’ve always wanted to learn to fly fish. It looks very therapeutic.
Flying Apps updated
I finally got around to writing the code to decode TAFs. A lot of the code for decoding individual terms is shared with the Metar decoder. Metars are actually a bit more complex. The only complexity with TAFs is dealing with a sequence of forecasts for different time periods.
I also updated the ADF Tester applet a little to bring it into this century. It is quite an interesting thing to note how much java’s internal mechanisms mutate over a period as small as 5 years.
The flying apps are on the Flying page.
Time for a new website
I have hated my website since I built the first one.
I’m going to take Melody’s advice and put up a new one, and really try to use it.