JTS

The church I attend had a need for a new kiosk that would be used to serve up the webpage of their online giving portal. I immediately volunteered, having had done a few basic kiosks in the past for fun, using the Morphix and other old-school linux live cd version.

Its been over six years since my last “kiosk” experience, and figured this would be a piece of cake. Surely, the open-source “kiosk” scene would be light-years ahead of where they were before, since nearly every major linux distribution has a “live-cd” version.

I found that it was nearly the opposite.

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We ran into a situation recently, where a wildcard SSL cert was purchased for a customer. When setting up the cert for the entire server, WHM/CPANEL would not tag the default CPANEL account with the new cert. Apache would serve the SSL, but the Apache conf file was not picking up the domain name.

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We are often times asked to work on clients servers that range greatly in hardware and software platforms. It seems that no two VPS/Cloud servers are configured the same, nor do they have the same user permissions to install/compile modules into PHP/Lamp.

This can be a pain if we need to install a third party module like PHP SSH2 to securely transfer some files between servers for backups.

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We recently started research work for a potential grant and some of the project focused on dynamic visualization of data sources. A few years ago we had done some work for a client in visualizing aircraft telemetry data using the stand-along Google Earth client. At that time, the Google Earth browser plug-in was not yet mature and still had a few issues.

With our current project, we needed a quick way to geographically visualize a large set of data. A years worth of Apache log files, a perl script, some PHP code, and we were able to create a fully automated data integration and visualization system with no cost.

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