I've just had to generate a new self-signed X.509 certificate for an internal website at work, and I thought I'd generate a certificate with multiple names, so we can refer to it as "www.foo.org", and "foo.org", and "machine.foo.org", and all of the other variants that people are likely to generate.

It wasn't easy to find the exact incanctations needed, but for the record, here they are:

I found this handy little site yesterday: searchplugins.net. Go to a website, use its search function to search for "TEST", then paste the resulting URL into searchplugins.net, and it will write an OpenSearch plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, or IE7 that you can download and install.

After vlad died last week, I rebuilt him with a new hard drive in the main system RAID array. This drive was twice the size of the old one – 160GiB, not 80GiB – so I had a bunch of spare space not being used. Yesterday, I bought another 160GiB drive, and decided to test the whole SATA hotplug thing...

Vlad is now alive again.

After spending a significant chunk of Saturday grubbing around on the floor, elbow-deep in computers (think James Herriot, only less gooey and with sharper edges), I've diagnosed vlad's problems: At least one of the two hard drives in the RAID-1 array containing my home directory has media errors, and the motherboard has decided to stop working entirely.

At about half eleven last night, my server, vlad, died. Quite comprehensively.