Tue, 01 Mar 2005

First Night on a New Novafoam Mattress

We bought one of those memory foam mattresses, a Novafoam one from Costco in particular. Buying a mattress sucks. We went to bunch of different stores and looked at pretty much all of the different types of mattresses out there.

We live in a small apartment with only room for a full-sized bed so we didn't want to spend a lot of money on a mattress because we'll probably buy a queen or king in a couple years. We've been using a futon mattress that's about 4 years old. It was great when I bought it, but now, the middle of it has been compressed to about 25% of its original thickness making it not very comfortable.

First, we went to Robinson's May and Sear's in the Northridge mall. The mattresses at Sear's were filthy so I couldn't get Denisa to try many out. Plus the sales guy yelled at potential customers, "Don't do that! Never do that!", as they were touching the mattresses. "Never just touch the mattress. You have to lie down on it."

Robinson's May was much nicer, but after lying on a couple mattresses, I was ready to call it a day. I thought it was just the clothing, but everything in the mall sucks the life out of you. I don't know how I spent all those days after school during my junior-high years wandering around the Del Amo mall. We stopped by the Select Comfort store before leaving. They are the ones that make those "sleep number" air mattresses. The beds were pretty comfortable, but the sales guy was too pushy, telling us how important it is to get a good night's sleep. Duh, that's why we're shopping for a bed. Plus, the fact that they charge $200 to add the digital remote control that shows the sleep number instead of the remote without an LCD display pissed me off. Not that I'd need it, but I just think that's ridiculous. But I guess the marketing ploy works for them. The sales guy did tell us that we should try the Tempur-Pedic mattresses.

Tempur-Pedic's gimmick is that their memory foam was developed at NASA. We tried it out at a mattress warehouse store and it was very comfortable. At around $1,300, we passed. The mattress warehouse place actually had the type of mattresses that I had been looking for all along. Denisa's mattress from childhood is about 20 years old, made from foam, and is still in great shape. It's nice and firm and hasn't lost its form at all. If communists were making such mattresses 20 years ago in Czechoslovakia, surely they must be available in the U.S. Well, this store did have some foam mattresses, latex and polyurethane, but they cost as much as an inner spring mattress. Our search continued.

We went to Costco to see what they had. They have good old-fashioned Sealy Posturpedic mattresses, but they didn't have the firm ones in the store, just a softer one. And they only had queen and twin. We could have ordered the firm full-size one, but we couldn't test it out first. We would have to make a decision by touching a dirty one-foot square sample.

So we decided to buy the Costco version of the memory foam mattress online. It's made by a company called Sleep Innovations. I figured it would feel similar to the Tempur-Pedic one, and if it weren't comfortable, Costco will take anything back.

It arrived yesterday. It weighs about 80 pounds and comes in a box. Within the box, the mattress is folded up in a vacuum sealed bag. The instructions say to let the mattress decompress for 24 to 72 hours, but by the time we were ready for bed last night, about six hours after I removed it from the bag, it looked like it was ready. It's 12 inches thick, putting us at least 8 inches higher off ground than we were before.

Unfortunately, I didn't sleep very well last night. I woke up at around 4am and had a hard time getting back to sleep. It felt like my pelvis was sinking too deep into the bed. Denisa loves the new mattress, mostly because it's much warmer than the futon. I'll have to give it some time. Hopefully, I'll get used to it.

Update: After a couple weeks, I've decided I like the mattress. For some reason, my old feather pillow seems inadequate though. I'm tempted to get some of these fancy Novafoam pillows to go with the mattress, but $100 each seems pretty steep.

Update (11/12/2008): Three years later, we're still happy with the mattress.

misc | Permanent Link

MySQL with SSL on Debian

Due to licensing issues, the Debian packages for MySQL are not built with OpenSSL support. In order to enable SSL, the packages must be recompiled.

server:/usr/src# apt-get build-dep mysql-server
server:/usr/src# apt-get install libssl-dev
server:/usr/src# apt-get source mysql-server
server:/usr/src# cd mysql-dfsg-4.0.23 (or whatever version you're building)
server:/usr/src/mysql-dfsg-4.0.23# vi debian/rules

Change --without-ssl to --with-ssl.

server:/usr/src/mysql-dfsg-4.0.23# vi debian/changelog

Add an entry to the top of the changelog.

mysql-dfsg (4.0.23-4-zerolag-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Compile with OpenSSL support

 -- Christian Warden   Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:32:05 -0800

Then build and install the packages.

server:/usr/src/mysql-dfsg-4.0.23# ./debian/rules binary
server:/usr/src/mysql-dfsg-4.0.23# dpkg -i ../*mysql*.deb

If you already an SSL certificate that you're using with mod_ssl, you can use that. Otherwise, generate a new key and certificate. See /usr/share/doc/mysql-server/SSL-MINI-HOWTO.txt.gz for information on how to generate a self-signed certificate. Add the key and certificate to /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

[mysqld]
...
ssl-key=/etc/mysql/server.key
ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/cert.key

Create a user in MySQL that requires SSL encryption.

mysql> GRANT ALL on db.* to user@10.0.0.10 IDENTIFIED BY 'password' REQUIRE SSL;

Now, you should be able to connect over SSL. Remember that the client must have been compiled with SSL support too. In order to use SSL, the client must use the --ssl-ca option, either on the command-line or in ~/.my.cnf (or [mysql] section of /etc/mysql/my.cnf).

client:~$ mysql --ssl-ca=/dev/null -h server -u user -p

As far as I can tell, there's no way to actually force the client to validate the servers certificate so it doesn't matter what value you set for ssl-ca. It doesn't even have to exist. This, of course, means that while the connection is encrypted, it's vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

See /usr/share/doc/mysql-server/SSL-MINI-HOWTO.txt.gz if you want to use client certificates to authenticate clients rather than, or in addition to, passwords.

Update: I originally forgot to note that you should update the changelog before building the packages.

tech | Permanent Link

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. - Frederic Bastiat