Software

I've been a fan of Nginx for a couple of years. It performs so much better than the main competitor Apache HTTP Server. However, on the negative side is that Nginx does not have all the bells and whistles as the software which has existed since dawn of Internet.

So I have to do lot more myself to get the gain. I package my own Nginx RPM and have modified couple of the add-on modules. My fork of the Nginx LDAP authentication module can be found from https://github.com/HQJaTu/nginx-auth-ldap.

It adds following functionality to Valery's version:

• per location authentication requirements without defining the same server again for different authorization requirement
• His version handles different requirement by defining new servers.
• They are not actual new servers, the same server just is using different authorization requirement for a Nginx-location.
  
• case sensitive user accounts, just like all other web servers have
• One of the services in my Nginx is Trac. It works as any other *nix software. User accounts are case sensitive.
• However, in LDAP pretty much nothing is. The default schema defines most things as case insensitive.
• The difference must be compensated during authentication into Nginx. That's why I added the :caseExactMatch: into LDAP search filter.
  
• LDAP-users can be specified with UID or DN
• In Apache, a required user is typically specified as require user admin.
• Now in LDAP-oriented approach the module requires users to be specified as a DN (for the non-LDAP people a DN is an unique name for an entry in the LDAP).
• LDAP does have the UID (user identifier), so in my version it also is a valid requirement.
  

IMHO those changes make the authentication much, much more useful.

Thanks Valery for the original version!

I finally got my account into younited. It is a cloud storage service by F-Secure, the Finnish security company. They boast that it is secure, can be trusted and data is hosted in Finland out of reach by those agencies with three letter acronyms.

The service offers you 10 GiB of cloud storage and plenty of clients for it. Currently you can get in only by invite. Windows-client looks like this:

Looks nice, but ...

I've been using Wuala for a long time. Its functionality is pretty much the same. You put your files into a secure cloud and can access them via number of clients. The UI on Wuala works, the transfers are secure, they are hosted on Amazon in Germany, company is from Switzerland owned by French company Lacie. When compared with Younited, there is a huge difference and it is easy to see which one of the services has been around for years and which one is in open beta.

Given all the trustworthiness and security and all, the bad news is: In its current state Younited is completely useless. It would work if you have one picture, one MP3 and one Word document to store. The only ideology of storing items is to sync them. I don't want to do only that! I want to create a folder and a subfolder under it and store a folder full of files into that! I need my client-storage and cloud storage to be separate entity. Sync is good only for a handful of things, but in F-Secure's mind that's the only way to go. They are in beta, but it would be good to start listening to their users.

If only Wuala would stop using Java in their clients, I'd stick with them.