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Site now SSL by default

Submitted by Sam Hobbs on

encrypt-all-the-things.png Google recently announced that it is going to start prioritising websites that offer HTTPS by default in its search engine results. At first, the positive effect will be small to give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS, but it will gradually become more of a significant signal. This is a good thing for the internet: SSL doesn't cost much for webhosts, and it makes it more difficult to spy on everyone all the time! The Electronic Frontier Foundation praised the decision calling it a "bold and welcome move to protect users". I wanted to start offering some of the services I run on my server to other friends and family, and I couldn't easily install the CAcert root on all of their devices, so this seemed like a good time to purchase a cert. The following describes how I configured the various services (Apache, Postfix, Dovecot) to use the new certificate from COMODO.

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SSL Certificate Signing with CAcert for Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu & Debian

Submitted by Sam Hobbs on

CAcert logo If you run your own website, email server or other services like OwnCloud at home then you may find yourself in need of a SSL certificate. When you install Apache, it generates a self-signed "snakeoil" certificate that can be used to encrypt your session. However, while this certificate is useful for testing purposes, it falls short in a couple of important ways:

  1. The snakeoil certificate has not been signed by an authority that your browser trusts, so your browser will throw an error when you connect.
  2. The common name on the certificate probably doesn't match your domain name. Another browser error.
  3. Short of manually inspecting the certificate's checksum, you have no guarantee that you are communicating with your own server - it could easily be an imposter using another self-signed certificate.

This tutorial will show you how to generate your own SSL certificate, and get it signed by the community driven SSL certificate signing authority CAcert. Once you have imported the certificate into your browser or into your operating system's root filesystem, your computer will automatically verify the identity of the server and you will enjoy error-free secure communications. Oh, and CAcert is free of charge!

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Multiple Websites and Subdomains with SSL/TLS in Apache2: Virtualhosts

Submitted by Sam Hobbs on

Want to host more than one website on your Raspberry Pi, without having to pay for multiple IP addresses? You can do this easily using Apache’s name-based VirtualHost configuration feature. This feature allows someone to connect to your Raspberry Pi (or other server) and get served different content based on the host header they sent with their request. This is automatic, and the user is none the wiser: they simply type your web address in the header, and your server uses that information to decide which website to display. Unless you tell them, they won’t know the Pi is also hosting other content.

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