The Temple of the Mighty Bague

“THE government is to invest £50bn of your money in British banks so they can lend it back to you with interest.The historic move is being hailed as a lifeline for the financial system as long as nobody asks too many questions.

Julian Cook, chief economist at Corbett and Barker, said: “The government will give your money to the banks so the banks can start lending you that money, probably at around 7% APR. ”

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BT are about to embark on a trial of software which spies on your web browsing. They claim it’s for your own good. More Info.

Alone in the clouds all blue

Lying on an eiderdown

Yippee! You can’t see me

But I can you

Pink Floyd w/ Syd Barrett - Flaming

Ok, so we all know there’s The Oracle Way and The Wrong Way (at least according to Oracle DBAs who aren’t me). Well, today I had to renew the SSL cert for an iAS installation. This isn’t something that would make me think twice - I’ve been dealing with SSL setups since 1996, or thereabouts, and iAS is just the 1.3 branch of Apache with a couple of directives overridden. So nothing to worry about.

Ah. Except it doesn’t use an SSL key or certificate in any way you’d consider normal. Instead, it uses a wallet. Stored on the server. Managed from a java gui. On a headless machine which doesn’t have a graphics board and lives 400 miles from me (hence headless).

So, I guess the preferred practice is to copy the wallet locally and work with it there, but that’s just plain silly - I have no desire to clutter up my machine with 4 gig of oracle client crap when I have SQLplus on the server. So - two ssh tunnels and a bit of X forwarding later and I have Oracle Wallet Manager running on my macbook.

There’s the expired certificate - I’ll export it to the filesystem to get a backup of it. Ok, not I’ll export the CSR and just use it to request a new cert. Off to the vendor, hand over a couple of hundred quid and BINGO! Nice shiny new certificate.

Right - I’ll remove the old one…done. Import the new one. Invalid. Hmmm. Does a double check. Import as Trusted Cert (just for elimination). Works fine. Hrm - is it self signing? No idea. I’ll just reload the old cert for now while I work it out. Read in the old cert and……what? It’s turned into a new one? Is there some kind of autosigning happening somewhere?

I am Jacks sense of complete bewilderment.

Since I was no bigger than a weevil

they’ve told me I was evil

that if bad was a boot then I’d fit it.

I’ve been a wicked little lady

but I’ve been trying hard lately

ah, f**k it I’m a monster I admit it.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - The Curse of Milhaven