The Site With the Lamp

August 26, 2005

My last run in with Apache SSL wasn't very pleasent. But that was with apache 1.3 where SSL support is not built in. Version 2.0 has built in support thanks to the export restrictions been done away with.

So it's time to have a go at installing apache SSL. To build it all you need to do is pass the --enable-ssl option to the configure script. Of course you need to have openssl installed (but have you seen a system that doesn't have it?)

Then I followed the documents to the letter to create the certificates and add the required configuration directives to the httpd.conf file. Yet the server simply refuses to accept connections on 443. Googling is no use. All the results are stories about alice and bob and money transfers from one bank account to another.

So it was time to stop googling and to think. Thinking is great, everyone should try it sometime. While thinking I realised that you need to add the

directive to the configuration file. Suprisingly this is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation. But now the server is happily accepting HTTPS connections.

The certificate is not validated from a CA, so the next step is to setup a certificate authority (just for the hell of it).

Posted by raditha at August 26, 2005 6:08 AM