# Small Web July & the Old Computer Challenge

I talked about installing Debian Lenny on a period-appropriate 2009
PC in 2023 [0], I still have that PC but have not used it much
lately. It seemed like now was a good time to start using it again,
given "Small Web July" [1] and the OCC challenge for 2025 [2], which
starts today. I'm writing this post on that PC in GNU Emacs v23.

The default gnome2 desktop on Debian Lenny is very stable, so I'm
going to keep this as I actually used it years ago and am familiar
with it. In that post I also mentioned upgrading OpenSSH to v7
(v7.0p1 specifically) from 2014, just new enough to compile cleanly
and to allow connecting to newer hosts with ed25519 keys.

Gopher support is built-in to the installed Iceweasel v3.0.6. This
was before plugin support, so I am using Iceweasel with privoxy
running on localhost, which was a common setup back in 2009, giving
me rudimentary ad blocking. To further help filtering modern web
crap, I'm using the Steven Black hosts file from github. I also
configured privoxy with socks v5 support so that I can browse
unencrypted web sites with some level of obfuscation, through an SSH
tunnel.

This all works well, but as I mentioned, the biggest issue will be
https support for TLSv2. I have what I think will be a workable
solution which I'll detail in the next post.

[0]: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/thinknix/glog/debian-lenny.md
[1]: gopher://sdf.org/1/users/elw/phlog/2025-07-05
[2]: gopher://occ.deadnet.se