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 use the HOSTS-file hack to avoid the warning message.

DreamHost has also now created a certificate you can install to make DreamHost a Trusted Root Certificate Authority. This implies that your system will automatically trust SSL certificates issues by DreamHost in the future and you will avoid any warnings about the certificate being issued by a untrusted or unknown certificate authority.

Updated: Apparently this type of wildcard certificate doesn’t work with sub-sub-sub-domains in Outlook, Outlook Express and OSX? These users will still have to use the hack to avoid warning messages.

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 a password and how to use rsync from the terminal to create a backup of your home folder on the server.

Part 2 of the tutorial shows you how to create an AppleScript that runs rsync automatically and how to setup iCal to run the AppleScript on a daily basis.

Latest In Tech explains how to do the same on Windows with cwRsync (a package of Rsync and Cygwin).

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 similar widget for Mac. Another DreamHost customer, Geoff, has now created such a widget. The OS X dashboard widget can be downloaded from his website.

Hat tip: Geoff

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 Applications by Patrick Lenz. You can also download the first 4 chapters as a PDF file (pdf).

The book shows you how to develop a Web 2.0 social news application (like digg.com) with Rails 1.2 (the version DreamHost is currently rolling out) and requires no knowledge of neither Ruby nor Rails.

If you like the sample you can buy the book (12 chapters) for $29.95 for the PDF edition or $39.95 (+ shipping) for the hard copy book.

To secure the backup you need to download the tar files. For this purpose the tutorial includes both a script for Windows (using a batch file and Scheduled Tasks) and Linux (using SSH and crontab) to download the files to your own computer on a regular basis.

Read the entire Automatic Backup article in the DreamHost Wiki and find related articles in the new Backup category.

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

thinkholelabs now features a great tutorial about how to use PuTTY to create a secure tunnel in order to secure Firefox (or any other browser) and your Instant Messenger sessions.

In fact the SSH tunnel technology allows users to perform various internet tasks including browsing, email, database management, etc.

Lot of people will find that version control is not the easiest subject to get started with, and most tutorials will contain lot of new vocabulary like trunk, tags and branches.

Kyle Neath has just written an excellent quick guide about Setting up Subversion with DreamHost and Windows. He jumps straight to the point and shows how to set up a repository at DreamHost and how to manage it with TortoiseSVN. Great introduction to everybody new to Subversion.

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 about the warning, you can go trough these extra steps in order to get rid of the message, but it will not make the security any better (or worse).

Let’s just recap the problem. When using SSL/TLS to secure your communication, you’ll get an annoying warning, either because the SSL certificate isn’t issued by a “trust provider”, or because the certificate is issued to mail.dreamhost.com and not to mail.yourdomain.com.

Outlook Express’s warning is not very helpful, and gives you no other options than accepting the problem or aborting. But if you open https://mail.yourdomain.com:995/ in your browser you’ll get a clearer picture. The browser will most likely show your communication with the mail server, which isn’t worth much since we’re not submitting any parameters, but we get a chance to view the security alert.

• The security certificate was issued by a company you have not chosen to trust. View the certificate to determine whether you want to trust the certifying authority
• The security certificate date is valid
• The name on the security certificate is invalid or does not match the name of the site

Mozilla Thunderbird is a bit more helpful (no surprise), and lets you examine the certificate and possible accept is directly from the alert message.

Trust the certifying authority

The first warning is because the certificate was not issued by a trusted Certification Authority like Thawte or VeriSign, but by DreamHost themselves. More info about Certification Authorities in the Knowledge Base.

If you click “View Certificate”, you get the possibility to “Install Certificate…”.

You will then start the “Welcome to the Certificate Import Wizard”. Just step through the wizard, and select the standard option for all choices.

If you connect to https://mail.yourdomain.com:995/ again, you’ll see that there is now one warning less.

Match name of site

The other warning states that there’s a mismatch of the domain you’re connecting to and the domain the certificate was issued to. This is because you’re connection to mail.yourdomain.com and the certificate is issued to mail.dreamhost.com.

We can get around this warning by creating a local alias for mail.yourdomain.com called mail.dreamhost.com.

Find out the IP address of mail.yourdomain.com by pinging the server. I’m on Randy, which has the IP 66.33.205.175. Put the following line in your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts on Windows XP, /etc/hosts on OS X and Linux):

# alias for mail.yourdomain.com
66.33.205.125 mail.dreamhost.com

Now update your email client to connect to mail.dreamhost.com instead of mail.yourdomain.com. Hopefully it will now connect to your mail server and fetch your mail without any warnings.

Please notice that the IP addresses of the mail servers are not necessary static, so you might have to update the IP in your hosts from time to time.

Your Mileage May Vary: Please let me know in the comments, if this works for you.