Linux Tech Tips

About Self-Signed Certificates A SSL certificate is a way to encrypt a site's information and create a more secure connection. Additionally, the certificate can show the virtual private server's identification information to site visitors. Certificate Authorities can issue SSL certificates that verify the virtual server's details while a self-signed certificate has no 3rd party corroboration. Step One—Install Mod SSL In order to set up the self signed certificate, we first have to be sure that Apache and Mod SSL are installed on our VPS. You can install both with one command: yum install mod_ssl Step Two—Create a New Directory Next, we need to create a new directory where we will store the server key and certificate mkdir /etc/httpd/ssl Step Three—Create a Self Signed Certificate When we request a new certificate, we can specify how long the certificate should remain valid by changing the 365 to the number of da...

This guide will explain how to set up a site over https. The tutorial uses a self signed key so will work well for a personal website or testing purposes. This is provided as is so proceed at your own risk and take backups! 1. Getting the required software For an SSL encrypted web server you will need a few things. Depending on your install you may or may not have OpenSSL and mod_ssl, Apache's interface to OpenSSL.Use yum to get them if you need them. yum install mod_ssl openssl Yum will either tell you they are installed or will install them for you. 2. Generate a self-signed certificate Using OpenSSL we will generate a self-signed certificate. If you are using this on a production server you are probably likely to want a key from Trusted Certificate Authority, but if you are just using this on a personal site or for testing purposes a self-signed certificate is fine. To create the key you will need to be root so you can either su to root or use sudo in front of...