geek stuff
Those of you who don't do (or are not forced into) web site stuff or IP services can ignore this one :)
[Edit: brought some of the "high" points out from behind the cut to get more eyes on this]
(Website) Content Management Software Sucks
Precious little of what I have found in the open/freesource world actually does anything to manage content.
They're all blogging packages or portals -- Except for Radiant. I'm starting to like Radiant.
And this "management" thing ... I'm the first IT guy to admit that he is a absolute luddite when it comes to things like Mambo/Joomla/Drupal/Plone ... but come on, it shouldn't be that hard to get your precious software to talk to a vanilla LDAP server (or maybe I should blame LDAP for this ...)
Suckiness of HTTP wrt SSL and DNS
It's sad to hear people talking of modifications to SSL to make virtualhosting of SSL sites easier when it's far easier to do it by using already present mechanisms in DNS -- HTTP should use SRV DNS records. Is there a good reason(s) other than inertia/ego that this is not being given more consideration than what seems a prone-to-problems hack job on SSL itself?
Benefits:
Jabber/XMPP uses SRV records, so you can one or more systems serving IM for your domain, none of which have to be named anything at all like a system in your domain, and the IM servers can run on aritrary ports, allowing you to share the cost of running an IM service with your friends from example.org, example.net, example.gov and example.edu. Similarly for SIP.
SRV records are MX records, generalized. They're not really that new of a thing in relative term -- they were codified back in 2000.
Use DNS to do its job of telling you (or your software) where to find things and let SSL deal with the job of telling you if you really got to where you wanted to go or not.
[Edit: brought some of the "high" points out from behind the cut to get more eyes on this]
(Website) Content Management Software Sucks
Precious little of what I have found in the open/freesource world actually does anything to manage content.
They're all blogging packages or portals -- Except for Radiant. I'm starting to like Radiant.
And this "management" thing ... I'm the first IT guy to admit that he is a absolute luddite when it comes to things like Mambo/Joomla/Drupal/Plone ... but come on, it shouldn't be that hard to get your precious software to talk to a vanilla LDAP server (or maybe I should blame LDAP for this ...)
Suckiness of HTTP wrt SSL and DNS
It's sad to hear people talking of modifications to SSL to make virtualhosting of SSL sites easier when it's far easier to do it by using already present mechanisms in DNS -- HTTP should use SRV DNS records. Is there a good reason(s) other than inertia/ego that this is not being given more consideration than what seems a prone-to-problems hack job on SSL itself?
Benefits:
- Websites can exist without requiring that it exist as a A or CNAME record
- Multiple SSL enabled sites can be virtual-hosted without requiring a separate IP address/port combo for each site
- IP address conservation when dealing with low-cost service providers
- No ugly port numbers in URLs which limit portability of sites
Jabber/XMPP uses SRV records, so you can one or more systems serving IM for your domain, none of which have to be named anything at all like a system in your domain, and the IM servers can run on aritrary ports, allowing you to share the cost of running an IM service with your friends from example.org, example.net, example.gov and example.edu. Similarly for SIP.
SRV records are MX records, generalized. They're not really that new of a thing in relative term -- they were codified back in 2000.
Use DNS to do its job of telling you (or your software) where to find things and let SSL deal with the job of telling you if you really got to where you wanted to go or not.