August

No AuthType Digest with LDAP Authentication Provider for Apache today

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 7:28pm, Friday, 2007-08-31

Motivation

Now that I've got an LDAP server up and running I'm trying to get my personal web server set up so it has a blanket authentication for my personal applications, static content and development stuff. The web applications I'm talking about aren't meant to be exposed to the public at large, they're not what you find here on Late Night PC Service or any of my other sites. These are things like PHP Calendar, Task Freak, SugarCRM, a bunch of development versions of apps I'm working on and some static content that might be a single html file or an image. I currently have a server that's accessible through DynDNS and I use basic HTTP authentication on it. The server runs Apache HTTPD 2.2 and has whatever modules I want on it. My next server is roughly the same but I want to make things a little more secure and a little simpler (at the same time no less). So my idea was to move to LDAP as the Authentication Provider and Digest as the Authentication Type.

My LDAP Tree So Far

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 8:24pm, Thursday, 2007-08-30
It took a lot of digging to figure out how I should approach choosing a good LDAP directory layout for my house but Michael Donnelly seems to have an answer I like. I created Organizational Units to hold all the people and all the computers. I want to have a few canonical OUs that hold the base records for each of these things then have other OUs that reference them and group by access. I don't know that I have it all figured out right just yet, but phpLDAPadmin makes it simple to move things around. Just make sure to hit the "Purge caches" link if you move stuff on one computer then view it on another.

Installing Asterisk 1.4 on OpenSuse 10.2

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 2:22pm, Thursday, 2007-08-02

I've had my Asterisk PBX offline for a while now for no good reason, so I decided I'd upgrade and put the latest Asterisk on my new machine. I wrote about the last time I installed, that was on an older AMD Athlon 1200MHz Thunderbird. It worked fine but I got a Linksys PAP2T-NA ATA and became very lazy. The ATA just registers with Les.net and I plug a phone in to it, so there's no need for Asterisk for just basic VOIP phone service.

I decided that I'd just use the ATA for a while then I got into some sound quality problems. I switched out many parts of the system trying to determine where the problem was but the best lead that I have so far is that my modem has issues. I'm not sure that the entire problem is with the modem but I do know that my Internet connection overall gets faster if I reboot it and that shouldn't be necessary.

Anyhow, voice quality issues apparently are common with VOIP and more people are using it anyway - the balance of features and cost is still in favour of VOIP. So I figure that if I get used to my system I can work the kinks out of it later. As time goes on and there are more users it should be easier to find help on my specifics too.

Today I want to revisit some of the work I did getting Asterisk 1.2 working and see what I have to do to get Asterisk 1.4 running. It's apparently not that different.

Fixed: Firefox Automatically Adds www. and .com

Submitted by User ProfileRob on 5:57pm, Wednesday, 2007-08-01
This has bugged me for a long time but it just took a little searching to fix. I enter the URL http://copper/ and Firefox can't connect so it decides that I really meant http://www.copper.com/. This is never what I meant. I don't know who runs copper.com, but they can rest assured that they'll stop getting requests from me for the internal web services that I run at home. The same thing happens even if you use the name localhost. I fully expect that most visitors at http://www.localhost.com/ are Firefox users who are trying to access a web server on their own computer. Apparently it was turned in to a preferences setting years ago as a result of this bug. The feature is called "domain name guessing" or a URL fixup and according to the site that tipped me off to this it might be a feature of Thunderbird as well. In current versions (Firefox 2) it can be found and turned off by entering about:config in the address bar. This brings up a huge list of settings. Find the setting browser.fixup.alternate.enabled (typing the name in the Filter box at the top makes it easy to find). Double click the name of the setting or its value to set it to True or False. You want False to stop this behaviour.