My Side Projects

Poodle is a security vulnerability that has been found in SSLv3. Since SSL is over ten years old, and the only browsers that support it as the strongest version of encryption are IE6 and older, in my humble opinion it is safe to turn it off.  Let's start with the easy one, Linux, in particular CentOS. NB you will most likely need to be root or be part of the sudo group to make the following changes 1)     Open the ssl.config file with your favourite text editor. In Red Hat based distributions like CentOS you should find it in /etc/httpd/mods-available/ssl.conf 2)     Find the line starting with  SSLProtocol 3)     Change it to  SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 This will allow all ciphers expect SSLv2 and SSLv3 4)     Save ssl.conf and exit your text editor 5)     Restart Apache by running the command service httpd restart 6)     Use a tool like sslscan to check all SSLv2 and SSLv3 ciphers are rejected or fail. An example of this would be ssl

The project I'm currently working on is Linux based, and I just can’t get my head around vi no matter how hard I try. Fortunately I have root privileges, so Emacs to the rescue :) We are using CentOS so installing is as easy as sudo yum install emacs   One of the many reasons I really like Emacs is you can run a shell inside Emacs. Press Alt – x Type shell Press enter NB the Alt key in Emacs is often called the Meta key and the key combination above would be shortened to M – x This allows me to split the Emacs window and have the shell in the bottom half and what I working on in the top half, see the image below. To switch between the shell and what I’m working on I press M – O (that’s Alt and the letter O and not the number zero, Alt zero will unsplit the screen) If like me you’re running Emacs inside Putty the first thing you might notice is the shell prompt is in dark blue on a black background. Not only is this very difficult to read but it c