Benefits of chrome

[Recent runs: Saturday 6/3: 5.2 in Starkville; Monday: 3.2; Wednesday: 3.2]

I’ve been gone from the utility company almost 4 years now. For a couple of years I did some intermittent work for them. But here in the last few months there hasn’t been anything.

Yesterday I received a text that they were having some trouble with an SSL certificate issue.

Over 10 years ago we implemented SSL because the browser world required it. One city did it with software and the other city did it with hardware. The software city of course wanted the cheapest solution so I cobbled up a self-signed SSL certificate and we moved on.

I remember after the first year the certificate expired and I had to scramble to get another one installed. The whole system is unusable when the certificate expires.

So the problem yesterday was that a 10 year certificate (ha ha) expired. I guess my thinking at the time I created the 10 year certificate was that this old unsupported system would be long gone by then. But Surprise! it is still around and the certificate expired.

So I was on the phone awhile last night and I didn’t really add much to the conference call except maybe to brainstorm about ways of moving forward.

Note to self: Buying/subscribing something like a certificate means somebody in management is going to have to sign a form on a periodic basis and eventually they might wonder what this line item is.. and then you are reminded that having this time limit out there is consequential. Burying an issue in a non-expense manner has a downside! And 10 years is never enough.

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But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

The certificate tools available on the servers involved both command line and GUI interaction. This is in an environment where there are firewalls and complicated virtual server arrangements.

The guy left holding the bag on this issue has a Windows laptop and he runs Putty to get command line access. But he can’t run the GUI tools.

I have a Chromebook which has ssh and has a window manager which is X-Windows compatible which means I can set things up to pipeline X-Windows GUI programs to display on my Chromebook. All I need is a gateway for ssh sessions.

I’m not sure, but I think modern Mac computers can do this also. As can linux of all flavors.

But Windows doesn’t come with any X-Windows compatibility. You can install free stuff like cigwin-X, Xming, whatever… it is even kind of hard to get a useful google search to find windows X compatibility tools.

I haven’t used my Chromebook very much. Last fall when we went on vacation I accidentally left my (linux) laptop at home so I zipped into Wal-Mart and bought this thing and it saved my vacation. (I have to do radio station work almost every day.) It has ssh and X-Windows compatibility and was relatively cheap.