I recently started using the excellent digital ocean for some of my cloud server hosting. When logging into my servers there was quite a delay, often a minute or more, before the password prompt appeared. I was getting the same delay when I use SSH keys for authentication too.

By far the most popular source control system in use today is Git. It was only about 6 months ago I made the switch from subversion for my personal code projects, and the only regret I have is that I didn’t do it earlier!

I’m lucky enough to experience code management at both ends of the spectrum. In my spare time I tinker with personal projects (some public but mostly private stuff). At work ‘enterprise’ would definitely be an appropriate description of our source code management.

With the advent of cloud computing, source control can no longer be kept neatly behind corporate firewalls.Of course you could stick a Subversion server or Git repository in your DMZ, but really, the correct answer is hosting.

There are many source-code hosting providers to choose from, but in this post I’m going to look at the two most popular Git hosting solutions: Github and Bitbucket.

Stud is the “Scalable TLS Unwrapping Daemon” written by bumptech and used by 85million bump users. I use it to offload SSL connections in front of haproxy for really scalable websites. It’s not so much that I need to scale massively, but it does allow me to run on really small (i.e. cheap) servers. I’m aware that the development branch of HAproxy now supports SSL directly, but as yet I have not seen any performance tests so for now I will stick with stud.

I have previously built stud on Debian Linux and the build process is really simple; make and then make install (once openssl-devel in installed and or course the utilities gcc and make too!)

But I’ve recently moved over to Centos as my server OS of choice and ran into some problems whilst building stud. The error reported when I ran make was file ev.h not found.

My Humax freeview recorder (a HDR-FOX T2 with 1tb drive) has recently started to show signs that it might be about to fail. The Hard drive is getting louder when recording and my most recent recordings pause periodically, often with the screen going blank and displaying the message ‘encrypted video cannot be show’ (or something to that effect). At first the pauses were infrequent and short, but more recently they’ve been getting much worse often missing a minute or more of the recording per ‘glitch’. The hard drive test found in the setting menu is also failing now too.

I’ve always had trouble downloading footage from my old DV camcorder using desktop tools like Kino, with it often locking up when I leave it to download a full tape.

I prefer to use OpenShot for editing, so all I really need is a simple tool to allow me to download footage from the camcorder. I’ve recently discovered the command line tool dvgrab, and it works wonderfully!

I recently set up HA proxy on one of my Debian 6 (squeeze) servers.

There were a few rather annoying ‘gotchas’ that took a while to figure out, so I’m documenting them in case I ever have to set up HAproxy again.

This is a quick how to with the steps used to compile Node.js on Centos Linux.

These steps were successfully executed on Centos 6.2 x86 with node 0.6.18

Building Node.js on Linux is fairly simple, as there are few dependencies. This is how I did it on Debain 6 (Squeeze). At the time of writing the current release of Node.js was 0.6.15. You’ll need to adjust the intructions below to reflect the version you’re building.

Update: I have also successfully tested these instructions with node.js 0.6.17 on Ubuntu 12.04.

I needed to extract/generate a public ssh key from a java keystore so that the Java application could SFTP some files using public key authentication.

The problem was that I couldn’t find any way of converting an ssl public key to an ssh public key. It seems that although ssl and ssh private keys are compatible, the public keys are not.