In my previous post I outlined how you can create your own self-signed CA.  With that CA in hand, you should be able to deploy your CA public certificate in any place you want certificates signed by it to be trusted, and then create your own SSL certificates.

If you want to make your own CA, usually for the purposes of signing certificates internally for testing and such, you can do that pretty easily with CentOS.  On a secure box somewhere, you’ll need to create a CA certificate.

BackupPC with its default configuration will catch the MySQL databases, but I don’t consider that kind of backup to be particularly reliable.  Much safer is to do a mysqldump of any relevant databases and then capture that with BackupPC.

I’ve recently moved my blog across to a VPS service.  A VPS is akin to a chroot jail, where you have your own server, but you’re running a common Linux kernel.  This also means you don’t really have your own filesystem - so for the sakes of paranoia I don’t want the VPS to have any privileged data on it, and I don’t want the VPS to be able to remote back into my main infrastructure to back itself up.

Managed to lay my hands on a low-cost VPS solution, which should fulfill my needs, so I decided to migrate across my blog to WordPress, so I have a lot more control over it and can set it up the way I want.

Well, it turned out that ipmi_si.ko was not broken after all in the new CentOS 6.3 kernels!  Red Hat changed the module to be included in the base kernel and not as a module, and therefore the way in which I was specifying parameters for it (through modprobe.conf) no longer worked.