Rel4tion-Wiki/news/certs-n-paste.mdwn

[[!tag /news]]
[[!meta title="Service and SSL Certificate Updates... and more"]]

Welcome to another news item! I'm going to just dump the latest news updates
here. The title doesn't really summarize everything.

# Rel4tion Development

In order to design a good API for [[/projects/razom-basic-store]], I decided to
create a program [[/projects/task-management]] that will generate requirements
and ideas. For that I'm probably going to use [[!hackage vty-ui]], a terminal
UI toolkit. I'm also writing [[/projects/undo]], an undo/redo stack I'll use in
the program. It's basically a port of the original C++ code from
[[/projects/sgp]].

I haven't touched [[/projects/undo]] for roughly a week because (plain lie) I
have exams in the univer$ity and (the only truth) I'm working on an IRC bot.
I wrote a lot of code and learned a lot during several days of almost-non-stop
coding. It was fun, and I'm not done yet.

3 new projects were born:

- [[/projects/irc-fun-messages]]
- [[/projects/irc-fun-client]]
- [[/projects/irc-fun-bot]]

# Wiki Theme

As you probably noticed, I made a new CSS design for the wiki. It's based on
Tango 16 colors and terminal web browsing. Thanks to **jchmrt** for providing
feedback.

# SSL Certificates

SSL certificates for web subdomains have been created and updated. The
following services now work with HTTPS (once you trust the CA, see
[[/access/tls]]):

- <https://www.rel4tion.org>, i.e. this wiki
- <https://git.rel4tion.org>
- <https://darcs.rel4tion.org>
- <https://media.rel4tion.org>, the MediaGoblin instance
- <https://files.rel4tion.org>, (FTP and SFTP backed) file storage
- <https://paste.rel4tion.org>, paste server

Are there still invalid certificates in use? If you encounter any, please
notify me and I'll update them.

# Mumble Server

A Mumble instane has been available on this server for long time, but it was
installed for private use, password protected. Yesterday I opened it. See
[[/access/mumble]].

# Paste Server

The paste server ([[!rel4sub paste]]) is getting a new dark theme. It's
incomplete, I apologize in advance for any layout or highlighting issues you
see there. I'll finish it soon.

The paste server also fully supports announcing to IRC channels. The way it
does so it somewhat ugly: It logs in, announces and quits. Every single time,
for each paste. When the IRC bot is ready, I'll plug the paste server into it,
and then things will be prettier. Including colorized messages, I hope :-)

# Jabber Self-Registration and More

Changes to [[/access/Jabber]] server:

- It seems user registration was accidentally disabled. It should work now.
- Shared roster support (a.k.a groups) is now enabled.

# Relays

No, no relays yet. Sorry. I was going to setup 2 relays between IRC and Jabber
rooms, but the only relay package Trisquel seems to provide - JIRC - isn't
maintained properly and doesn't work. After some hacking, it still fails to
connect to the [[/access/jabber]] server and I don't know why. So right now
there are no relays, but I'll find a way to launch them.

Perhaps using the IRC bot. I'll give it access to Jabber. There must be XMPP
client/bot libraries for Haskell.

# Unified Signup and MediaGoblin

One issue with MediaGoblin is the spam I get when registration is open So right
now registration happens through me. A bigger problem with the server as a
whole, is that you need to create an account for each service separately. It's
time to solve this problem.

I'm going - when I allocate some time for this - arrange a custom CGI that will
create multiple accounts at once on the various services. Those services which
can, will perhaps use some shared SQL or LDAP user database. For the rest, the
CGI will use their command-line registration tools to create new accounts.

Giving each user an e-mail account is probably not very useful since most users
already have their favorite e-mail provider, but for some services it makes
sense to make a unified CGI. For example, have the CGI give a new user:

- Wiki account
- MediaGoblin account
- Upload SSH key for wiki git push and the other git projects
- Optionally Jabber account + bitlbee
- Optionally mail account

Also, identifying users by their NotABug of Freepost accounts would be great.
But that depends on those projects. Freepost has a custom login and Gogs, from
the little I understand, isn't very modular and perhaps not easy to adapt for
custom identity services. We'll see.

# HERITAGE and Box

HERITAGE is getting some new commits which may make Box closer to playable. I
updated the instace at [[!rel4sub heritage]]. The issue of examing items after
taking them is still open.

Perhaps I'll finish [[/projects/text-adventure]] at some point and even make
the IRC bot run games inside a channel. But that will take some time, as there
are already several open projects in the queue.

[[!meta author=fr33domlover]]