The holidays being over, we’re going hot and heavy on our get-Lisa-off-the-road plans.
She’s plugging away at getting our merchandise, and designing our websites, I’m getting the infrastructure up.
eGroupWare continues to deliver.
I’m working on installing OsCommerce first for a friend of ours. It looks like it seriously needs an administrator’s front end. I’m currently on a detour to install PHPMyAdmin, which well at least help. This is turning into a major detour because the next step is to put authentication onto PHPMyadim so that we can hit it from the road, and that in turn seems to want SSL, since I need to learn about that anyway when it comes time to take orders.
Learning about SSL has been a major PITA. How it works and how to install it is ok, but the CAs (Certificate Authorities) put out a massive smokescreen to keep you from figuring out what you’re actually getting for your money.
I still can’t figure out how and how much to buy a single certificate which I can use to vaiidate all the servers in the vast Richards web-empire. I’m 98% sure it can be done, but the only vendor I’ve found that explicitly supports the practice seems to be a rather dodgy reseller.
That however is a problem for another day. Today I’ll put PHPMyAdmin and eGroupware behind a self-signed certificate, which is what I did with sendmail on chuck. Lisa and I are the only users so browser recognition is irrelevant.