I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

A couple of places I love spending time in East Lothian. Saltoun Big Woods and Cockenzie House and Gardens. January 2017. Chilly but clear, blue skies and a refreshing frost!

I took time for a quick visit to Bamburgh to walk Badger. It was an Open Weekend at the Castle. So I tool the opportunity to visit. What a wonderful place.

I doubt the audience for this post is greater than 1. This is more aide-memoire than Post :-)

I recently had to renew my SSL certificate for the website using 1and1 as the SSL provider (the SSL Certificate is provided with the hosting account).

Try as I might the files generated would not load into the Web Server. There were a couple of things which were required:

1. The Certificate files seemed to require to be changed from .cer files to .crt files. I do not mean they had to be edited – I mean I simply changed the filetype.
2. The Private Key file would not install – indeed the logs suggested it could not be found. The issue was that the file had been generated with a password embedded – making it unreadable to the web server process – and the following OpenSSL command line code resolved the issue:

   openssl rsa -in original_file.key -out working_file.key

When this new file (working_file.key) was used in place of the original file the Web Server loaded once again.

And the website was encrypted..!