Tag: SSL

Raise Shields!

Nick Jackson / / Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else

Today we’ve just finished setting up and testing our brand-new, very shiny SSL certificate for our primary Online Services support server. This means that the CWD is now ready to be used on all of the University’s secure systems, starting (hopefully later today) with a roll-out of the new wireless sign in page.

What this also means is that we’ve been able to tighten the security on Nucleus so that in future all requests must be over SSL. For those using Nucleus for things please take this as a warning – as of the end of the week all Nucleus requests over HTTP will fail.

Finally, we’re a step closer to our complete OAuth implementation! We’re still ironing out a few bugs and awaiting our security audit, but it’s getting there.

SMB vs HTTP vs HTTPS

Nick Jackson / / Print From My PC

So… more on printing. Alongside documenting the service (and cobbling a nice new stylesheet together to replace the old, somewhat kludgy one) I’ve been doing some work with a stopwatch on the relative speeds of SMB vs IPP/HTTP and IPP/HTTPS. The results are slightly unusual.

  • SMB – Printing from Ubuntu and OS X is under 10 seconds for most jobs.
  • IPP/HTTP – Very fast from Windows, but Ubuntu and OS X normally around the region of 30-40 seconds.
  • IPP/HTTPS – Very fast from Windows, but Ubuntu and OS X normally in the region of 15 minutes. Yes, minutes.

I really need to convince people that SMB is a viable solution and isn’t the massive security risk they seem to think it is. It’s faster, easier and more efficient, at least until I can work out how to make a *nix CUPS server talk to SafeCom.