Entic.net: On The Cloud

... not that their offerings were that exciting. They were expensive and not sure it was worth it. For a limited time, we would like to offer a free month of service for anyone wanting to switch from Verio's offerings.

This might also be a good time to bring up something about our own business. We are still kicking strong and wanted to make sure everyone is aware, we are not going out of business. One of our prospective customers recently was wondering about that, since our web site has had no updates in a long time.

There is good reason for that! We are currently revamping our whole site behind the scenes. We'll also be releasing some new services. As you know, our site is done in-house, in Pylons - a Python web framework. So, site/code changes take some time, but we can do full customizations and the pricing is cheaper.

So, stay tuned...

Oh, one more free offer. We are now offering free OpenSolaris VPS (beta) service. Once the beta period completes, we'll charge at our regular pricing (which will be reflected on our new site). Let us know if you are interested!

You can use inetconv and inetadm to convert and enable/disable /etc/inetd.conf services in Solaris 10's SMF framework. One thing we see people ask is, how to delete those entries that now show up when doing inetadm.

Simple! Remember, inetconv converts the old inetd.conf format to SMF. And to manage SMF scripts, you can use svccfg to delete a service. e.g. svccfg delete svc:/network/tftp/udp:default

We are quite disappointed that Sun couldn't get out of the hole by itself. It had all the ingredients, but no recipe. We really loved Sun. Most of us at Entic, have worked for Sun for quite some time. Its one of the very few companies that has been here > 25 years.

Its really quite unfortunate that Jonathan and the board saw the need to call it quits.

In the end, we've been told that the Sun brand will still exist in Oracle (part of the deal). So, a glimmer of hope and preservation. We still like the Sun hardware and will continue to invest in it, until that changes.

SSL certificates pricing ranges from $15 to several hundreds of dollars. We won't go into the technical details, but we'll just introduce you to the pricing behind them.

In firefox 3, secure sites are color coded with Gray, Blue, or Green "Passport Officer". Gray means the site has no security. The blue means the site is secure and you can be assured that it is "safe" to provide personal information to the site. The green means the site is secure and encrypted, but also that the site has gone through Extended Validation.

The blue SSL certificate providers just validate the domain owner. This ensure the site is secure so as long as you enter in the right domain name into the browser, e.g. Entic.net instead of Etnic.net.

The green-like SSL certificate is a step further. It validates the business and confirms the owners of the site as who you would expect them to be (e.g. checkout http://paypal.com). If we had a certificate like this, our business name would show up in the certificate as "Entic Services", no one else can have this registered in their domain/certificate.

(You'll find those image boxes when you click on the Firefox site identification button next to the URL location box.)

Now the big difference between the green and the blue...

The blue SSL certificate costs $15 or less per year. You should not pay more than that. If you are, you are wasting your money. There really isn't a good reason to use this unless you run a high profile site, so don't waste your money. Remember, the blue provides good encryption and security. There is a reason Google and a ton of other companies use just the blue SSL certificate.

To find the $15 pricing, search the sponsor links on Google.

Hope that helps, if you have any questions, let us know!

Adobe released a brand new version of Acrobat PDF reader for Solaris x86. Something that's been missing for a long time!