Posts by philmck

Nanosludge

How about... Nanosludge

The URL http://www.natwest.co.uk is still throwing an error for me (not redirecting to a secure URL).

I have no objection to Country & Western music performed between consenting adults in private, but I once spent a week driving long distances around California and Nevada when I had a few days off between Christmas and New Year. The rental car had a cassette player but I had no cassettes with me, so the only entertainment I had was the radio, and once clear of the cities all they played was C&W. Being Christmas, it was C&W carols, of which there were only half a dozen and they were repeated endlessly.

I've never been able to listen to C&W since.

Security headers would have prevented this

A quick check of https://observatory.mozilla.org/ or one of the related sites it uses would have avoided this. It might be a bit over the top for a simple shopfront site, but for a bank not to do this is downright negligent.

It's not 'Strayan it's "strine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strine

If an outage like this happened to me (as it has more than once) I would immediately start restoring my backups to a completely new provider, because you don't know if or when the original provider will fully recover, because restoring and DNS propagation take a while, and because better providers almost certainly exist but you have to test them.

I currently use a VPS at transip.eu in Amsterdam and they have been fairly reliable.

I tried viewing this very article on a secure connection (just replaced http with https) and ironically it eventually just timed out.

Anyone who still wants to support browsers without SNI capability will need extra IP addresses, which is unfortunate.

"The internet" is hard to define

I guess the first IP packets I generated were probably emails originating from Prestel (Micronet) or Telecom Gold or Compulink (CIX). They didn't have any serious content. I would download software and exchange messages from bulletin boards, but not using IP protocols.

Later I browsed text-only web pages via Compulink (using gopher to find them).

I sent proper IP packets from Trumpet Winsock after getting a Demon tenner-a-month dialup connection.

Seriously useful messages started being exchanged when I began using usenet.

I'd prefer a "responsive" version of the main site rather than a separate site.

Two big "gotchas" I discovered with DigitalOcean - to get an additional IP address (for sites that need SSL certificates) you have to get a new "droplet", which doubles the cost; and they're not environmentally friendly. There are better (and cheaper) hosts in the Netherlands and Germany.