We are not afraid to be offline together

The CZ.NIC Association joined the campaign – Family Offline Week with the subtitle “We are not afraid to be offline together“, which will be held this year from May 11 to May 19, 2019. The purpose of the 4th year of the campaign is not only to celebrate the International Family Day, on May 15, but above all to think about the excessive use of digital technology. The uncontrolled use of mobile phones, tablets and computers not only causes health problems but also worsens interpersonal relationships. Children from early age play with tablets and mobiles, often losing social contact with their peers.

Safer Internet Day in the Czech Republic: introducing new project and market unification

The CZ.NIC Association used the Safer Internet Day to introduce its new project, aimed at children´s safety online. The CZ.NIC Association acts as a coordinator of the project that started on 1 January 2019, another partner is the Safety Line, ensuring the operation of a helpline. CZ.NIC will continue operating the Czech national hot-line STOPonline.cz, which received a record number of reports last year.

A behind-the-scenes look at the production of Turris MOX cases

From the beginning of the development of the Turris MOX router, we have faced a difficult task –how to assemble the modular system so that it does not collapse during handling and, at the same time, make it as user friendly as possible when the user deciders to disassemble and reassemble it. You will be able to find out whether we have accomplished this task or not in the coming weeks when the first MOXes in cases arrive to their users. In the following article, I would like to introduce you to the development and production of the final case of our new product.

Data from routers map connection speed

One of the less known advantages of the Turris router is the possibility to verify quality of Internet connection, the so-called QoS (Quality of Service), i.e. especially to measure the download and upload speed, IPv6 support, DNSSEC and parameters connected with net neutrality. Such a measuring may serve to analyse the use of the line and to evaluate whether paying a high speed fee is unnecessary. The experience of the Turris router users shows that the majority of their time online is spent in the slowest zone (0-250 kbps). Moreover, even when the majority of data is transferred in higher speed, fast operation may have only a tiny representation from the time´s point of view. Especially those who do not spend a lot of time watching videos pay extra for high speed connection for a relatively short time of use, mainly for the moments it takes to load a page or download and send an e-mail.

Reinstalling Openldap in CZ.NIC

At the beginning of the year, a need arose to reinstall the LDAP, which had been running in CZ.NIC on an older OS, and I figured I did not want to miss such an interesting “challenge”. And I was very excited about it until I realized that the same server was, as a “bonus”, probably, running Freeradius and Radsecproxy with a connection to Eduroam. Of course, this was also to be rewritten as the syntax between the versions Freeradius v2 and v3 had changed a little bit. Only then I understood and admired the patience of people who set these things in CZ.NIC before me and I know that they have “enjoyed” this quite a lot. But this is a topic for another day, as this blog post should be about installing LDAP. I emphasize that this article discusses only basic LDAP settings.