Using pfsense to sign private wildcard SSL certificates

pfsense is a wonderful router appliance BSD distro that I’ve enjoyed for some years now.

I use the pfsense certificate manager to issue certs for my VPN client devices. For my Internet-facing life, I have legit SSL certs for everything, I’ve a neurosis about it. But it’s bothered me that for my LAN servers, I’ve continued to use Self-Signed certs for interfaces. Today I fix that.

Here are my notes on how to create and sign a wild-card SSL cert using pfsense for internal use. Note that this approach means you will make your own certificate authority which then must have its root cert installed on any machine you want to use your own certs.

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iOS App: To Free, or not to Free, that is the question

One of my iOS apps is Search Site, is a little functional thing I made mainly to help familiarize myself with the full workflow of iOS app development. (IE, it’s a glorified Hello, World! app). It’s been released for free for a few months and has had very few downloads.

In the last month, it has suddenly started getting a relatively large amount of attention, specifically from Asia. I decided to try making it non-free, so I set it to the minimum possible paid value, $1CAD. After a week I decided to make it free again, for now.

See if you can tell when it wasn’t free:

My plan with it is to leave it free, but perhaps release an improved version that also has banner ads that can be paid to go away. For now, I’ll just enjoy that there’s a user-base growing for this cute little application.

STP Replugged – Who would you call?

I think it’s time again that I re-plug my free little “Shit Talker Phoenix” program I’ve written for OSX.

As you can see from the screenshot, it’s a window saturated with a mess of buttons. Each of these buttons are linked in to a speech synthesis engine, so when you press a button, the computer speaks whatever’s on the button.

I based this entirely off of the old Shit Talker by Jaundice, a well known, ancient but hilarious little program for making “prank” phone calls. I used this program back in the days of Windows 98 and if you try to run it now you’ll be met with general instability and ugliness (though you could run it inside a virtual machine). I was motivated to re-write it for OSX simply because that’s what I was using at the time and I wanted something I could run natively to do the same thing.

I actually had written a Java version of STP prior to this, but I had so many headaches in trying to bundle it in to something people would find easy to run that I eventually gave up on that version of it. Though I have goofed with the idea of resurrecting that project, but distributing it as a Java Applet and thus give people a web address they could go to in order to just run it out of their browser.

So what you think? Maybe you’ll have fun using this to call your mom and pretend you’ve become a robot? It’s always a good bet to use this when dealing with telemarketers too. What would you use STP for?

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Upgrade Experience with Ubuntu 9.04

Ubuntu Logo
Ubuntu Logo

Hello World!

While, yesterday was Ubuntu 9.04 day! With the latest official release of Ubuntu Linux, I decided to put one foot in the water and give upgrading my mac pro from 8.10 a whirl. The process went fairly perfectly with one major flaw. Upon rebooting my upgraded system, my video driver for xorg was no longer functioning properly. The solution was to remotely login through ssh, download & install the latest driver (from here) and then reboot again. After that I was greeted with the beautiful new Ubuntu 9.04 login screen and the upgrade was nearly..

I did go on to find that flash wasn’t working for me properly anymore. I found an interesting post that offered some good suggestions here. Though I found following the preferred suggestion didn’t exactly work out for me. All I did was remove the nonfree flash package and then reinstalled the “flashplugin-installer” package.

I posted pretty much the same comments as above regarding the video issue, with a little more detail on the Ubuntu Forum.

My flash experience is reposted here, but whatever, cause I just said it all over again in this post.