Since the last time I installed machine (from scratch), I did not have any webmail back in place. I used to work with horde, a well known webmail framework. It is certainly very powerful, but I use the webmail very sparsely, when I cannot use ssh to access my machine. It is also quite complicated to install.

Last wednesday, or the week before, I found myself cornered in such a situation. The webmail offered at my lab was not enough (I wanted to read a specific mailbox on another server). This morning, I resolved to scratch this itch. I managed to do it in less than 30 minutes, without having read any documentation (I had just browsed the screenshots on the software's website). Congratulations for the good work to Roundcube!

In this post, I include a script that can generate Self-signed X509 certificates (for use with https for example) with several names for the server. This is required because the certificate exchange is made on a lower level than the protocol exchange. For example, Apache can deliver to different domain names, but only one certificate can be used because it is asked before the domain name negotiation. So aliases must be included in the certificate or warnings are printed to the user.

So here is the script. Just run it with the main name for the server in first place, and the other names after it.

Do not hesitate to change the default values in the auxiliary and mandatory openssl-conf.cnf file.

There's a new Debian Planet out there, this one for Portuguese folks: Planet DebianPT. This new planet simple aims to aggregate Portuguese folks that are in any way related with Debian. This blog is now being agregated there, and if you think that your blog should also be, just read this.

Unfortunately I don't blog about Debian as much as I wanted to (must get some more time for that...), but I have a couple of things that I want to talk about, so maybe I'll use this as an incentive ;-)