Category Archives: News

News Relating to CAcert

Entdecke ennet dem Rhein CAcerts neuer Quell’

Wenn die Sommerhitze unerträglich wird, dann ist es höchste Zeit, sich an den Gestaden des Rheins etwas zu erfrischen. Und was liegt näher, als darauf ennet dem kühlen Nass seine Schritte nach St. Augustin zu lenken, wo die Freiwilligen von CAcert an der FrOScon etwas absolut Neues persönlich vorstellen?

Une révolution s’annonce le 14 juillet

A l’occasion de ce 14 juillet, CAcert a l’honneur d’annoncer par cette voie une nouveauté à tous les membres français et francophones de la communauté CAcert. Nos bénévoles se feront un plaisir de vous le montrer et de vous l’expliquer personnellement: Juste de l’autre côté du Rhin, près de Cologne-Bonn, à la FrOScon.

Critical servers upgrade project

As a faulty connection cable between www.cacert.org and the signer made it necessary to travel to the datacenter this weekend instead of the planned schedule later this year we were able to finish this part earlier than expected: We finalized on the last steps of moving CAcert to a more modem hardware and software on critical servers.

This project was started “somehow” in May 2020 when the signer power board broke just before the Corona-Lockdown took place. The old signer was replaced by the same model at this visit. Since then we had several outages, which were mainly caused by broken hardware, sometimes noticed by our members, sometimes only visible in our internal monitoring.

Today the last of the old servers (our signer) was powered down as it was replaced by two modern machines using a more recent debian release, but keeping the old signer-coding.

The complete hardware-replacement-project reduced the power consumption of all CAcert-servers for more than 60%.

But that’s not all: We have plans to put our signer-environment to a new software written in Go, but here we need YOUR help in testing and reviewing the code. Feel free to contact support@cacert.org to get in touch to our experts.

Screenshot of the CAcert browser client certificate web application

Lowering the barriers of entry

In the coming few months we will start running some services with Let’s Encrypt server certificates. We decided to go this route to make it easier for people to join our community or contribute to our work.

A nice side effect of this move will be that we can provide these services https encrypted and redirect all unencrypted http URLs to their https counterparts.

We will continue to use our own server certificates for our CA systems and other services that are only relevant after joining our community.

We also will continue to provide our community with client and server certificates. All our services that support or require client certificates will still use those issued by our CA.

We recently implemented a web application to make it easier to get started with client certificates. The application provides a friendly and completely client side interface to generate key pairs and signing requests in your browser.

Last chance, hurry up, catch your review!

Dear friend of #CAcert, here comes the last #bugs that needs a #review. We are so glad, that you are willing to #help you #community and review only one of them during the #spring #offensive.

https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1310
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1129
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1302
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=875
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1304

We published all ready 12 bugs for review earlyer today in this channel. Maybe, you find a more conviniant one there?

Papillon, vient voir les bugs

Qu’est-ce qu’une #revue par rapport à la résolution d’un problème? Vole comme un papillon sur l’une de nos fleurs de bug et regarde le code. Voici la troisième série de quatre, si tu ne trouves rien qui te convienne pour participer à l’offensive #CAcert du printemps, nous t’en fournirons quatre autres dans quelques heures ou regarde les huit premiers, publiés il y a quelques heures.

This are new links, number 9-12:
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1149
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1382
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1383
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1355

Join the CAcert Spring Offensive

What’s a #review compared to solving a problem? Flutter like a butterfly on one of our bug flowers and check out the code. Here are the second four, if you don’t find anything suitable for you to join the #CAcert spring offensive, we’ll give you four more in a few hours.

https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1354
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1423
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=775
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1253
Nothing that fits you? Have a look to the first four links we published two hours ago in the german post.

Mach es wie die Schmetterlinge

Was ist schon eine #Review im Vergleich dazu, ein Problem zu lösen? Flattere wie ein Schmetterling auf eine unserer Bug-Blumen und Schau dir den Code an. Hier sind die vier ersten, wenn du nichts für dich passendes findest, um bei der #CAcert Frühlings Offensive mitzumachen, reichen wir dir in einigen Stunden vier weitere nach.

https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=971
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=8
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1360
https://bugs.cacert.org/view.php?id=1317