OpenSSL/OpenSSH
Today I decided that I wanted to get into the more secure connections. Not that I think my systems are open to massive attacks, but there's a chance that something might be going wrong, and I want to at least have the tools to protect myself. So I got OpenSSL and OpenSSH and decided to figure them out.
The first thing is to build OpenSSL. It's easy and builds cleanly depositing itself into a reasonable place in /usr/local/ssl. Then build OpenSSH. If you've done it right, the defaults will make a working sshd - but you still have to get it to start up and shut down properly. So I spent a few minutes putting it into the chkconfig system on Linux and Irix, and then made a simple script for Solaris. Nice.
Now I have SSH running on all of the machines that touch the world, and that's good. I also have the clients on several others which is even better. Now I can get to places a little more securely. One of the nicest clients is PuTTY for Windows 95/98/NT/2000 - excellent piece of code.