Last week I stumbled across a post from last year, where somebody described how it was impossible to download an important infrastructure program securely on Windows. My first reaction was of course to pity the poor souls that are still stuck with Windows. How easy is it to just type apt-get install and have all the downloading and validation and installation conveniently handled for you.
Today I was going to set up my new server. First I downloaded the current iso file from ubuntu.com. Before installing it onto an USB stick, I thought about this blog post again. Actually I should validate this ISO! I knew before, but I usually didn’t bother. So I gave it a try. I had to search a bit for it on the download page. The easiest is if you manually pick a mirror. Then you will find the hash sum files in the index page. Some websites along the way were encrypted, others were not. The downloads themselves were not. But that didn’t matter since the hashes were GPG signed. I don’t have to do this all too often, so IÂ just followed the community howto. My downloaded iso file was valid, so I moved on installing it.
The hardware is actually from computer-discount.ch. For quite some time I was searching for ways to buy computer equipment with BitCoin. The American big name tech companies that accept BitCoin either do it only outside of central Europe, or don’t deliver here. So I was quite excited to find this company from Ticino. The experience so far is very good.
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