Category: Linux

Fixing HTTPS mixed content issues in Chrome

I’ve been beta testing the new Lets Encrypt Certificate Authority so have been adding HTTPS to various services however I hit on a problem where Chrome wasn’t showing the green padlock for a specific application. Instead it was showing the broken padlock because it was saying there was mixed content.

In https, mixed content is usually where you have a resource (css, image etc) thats being served in http instead.

So first I went in to developer tools to find that resource. Now it can be difficult to find, however one first tip is to go to the network tab and right click on any of the columns (e.g. Name) and ensure that scheme is ticked. This now adds a new column which should show https for everything. The one that shows http is the culprit.

Except in this case it didn’t. Everything was https. So what’s happening?

Well in Chrome it caches the https state with each resource, and in this instance I had https originally working with a test certificate. Now I have a real one, so chrome was being confused.

The solution was to restart chrome by opening a new tab and entering the url: chrome://restart

Once chrome restarts (it will restart every tab/window you have open) the problem was fixed.

Installing Java 7 on Debian Squeeze

For all of my servers I use Debian, however that distribution has a few problems, mainly the packages can be a bit behind the cutting edge.

Now this is usually a good thing if you are looking for stability – cutting edge software can have issues, especially from new features etc, so for a live environment you want something thats stable.

However, there does come a time when this can bite back. You either need a feature thats not in the standard repositories or in this case the version is now unsupported.

In Debian Squeeze it has Java 6 – but that was EOL’d a couple of months ago so is no longer supported by Oracle. The current version is Java 7 update 17.

So how do we get Java 7 installed?

Well it’s pretty easy to do, we just need to add another repository into apt and install it.

First the repository:

sudo su -
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu precise main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys EEA14886
apt-get update
exit

What that does is to install the ubuntu ppa repository into apt, setup the public keys and then load the package lists.

Next we need to install it:

sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

This will now download Oracle Java 7 and present you with a couple of screens about licensing. Just ok and accept it and it will now install.

That’s it. You now have Java 7 installed – but it’s not the default JDK (if you already had Java 6 installed). If you want it to be the default then there’s just one more thing to do:

sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-set-default

That’s a dummy package but it will make Java 7 the default on that machine. If you want to check then you can check:

peter@titan ~ $ java -version
java version "1.7.0_17"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_17-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.7-b01, mixed mode)

Setting up a Weather WebCam on Linux

Weather webcams are always popular and it is easy and free to set one up yourself.  This article will show how to setup a simple USB webcam to produce still images and serve them on a local apache webserver.

Continue reading “Setting up a Weather WebCam on Linux”