Unofficial DreamHost Blog

If you’re using SSL IMAP, POP3 or SMTP (as recommended) you’ll have noticed that DreamHost’s SSL certificate expired today.
DreamHost’s new certificate uses a wildcard subdomain *.mail.dreamhost.com, so it should now be possible to change your mail servers to a1.balanced.your-email-server.mail.dreamhost.com to get rid of the “host mis-match” error. This means that you no longer have to [...]

Michael Lee from Addison Road has written a great tutorial about how you can use the vast amount of storage space on your DreamHost account to backup your Mac.
Part 1 of the tutorial shows how to create a new user with shell access, how to enable SSH access to the server without having to supply [...]

Status Blog Update
Small update to the DreamHost Status Blog. The entries are now color-coded after severity and it’s clearly marked if the issue is currently resolved or not.

OS X dashboard widget
Back in October DreamHost advertised a customer created DreamHost Status Widget for Yahoo! Widgets (Konfabulator). Back then a lot of Mac users was requesting a [...]

For everyone who has wanted to try out Ruby on Rails, but found the task a bit daunting: SitePoint has just published a Ruby on Ruby on Rails tutorial for beginners.
The tutorial is in fact two chapters (chapter 3 and 4) from their new Ruby on Rails book: Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web [...]

A new version of WordPress, the popular blogging engine, has been released this weekend. The release contains several important security fixes, so it’s highly recommended for all users to upgrade as soon as possible either manually or through DreamHost’s One-Click Install.

DreamHost customer matttail has written a tutorial about how to automatically backup your domains and databases. By using the crontab command to run a series of scripts, the process creates a tar file (a compressed file) with all the files for a given domain and a tar file with the MySQL database data.
To secure the [...]

A couple of DreamHost customers have taken initiative to start both an Unofficial DreamHost IRC channel and an Unofficial DreamHost Jabber channel.
If you like to chat with fellow DreamHost customers check out the #dreamhost room on the irc.freenode.net network or join chat@conference.jabber.newdream.net with Jabber.
Hattip: Will

Previously I’ve written about how to use SFTP, SSH and SSL to secure your web surfing experience. One of the tips was to use PuTTY as your SSH client to create an encrypted connection to DreamHost’s servers.
thinkholelabs now features a great tutorial about how to use PuTTY to create a secure tunnel in order to [...]

One of the news in last month’s newsletter was the addition of Subversion support at DreamHost. Subversion is an open source system for revision/version control designed specifically to be a modern replacement for CVS.
Lot of people will find that version control is not the easiest subject to get started with, and most tutorials will contain [...]

I finally found time to write this entry about how to get rid of the security warning when using SSL/TLS for your email. Sorry about the delay.
SSL has two purposes: security and authentication. Even if the authentication fails, the security still works and all the traffic will be encrypted. If you’re as annoyed as me [...]