dimitris kalamaras

math, social network analysis, web dev, free software…

Month: October 2016

Great Movies: District 9

District 9 is one of these movies that tell you a lot of real-world stories using exotic, if not superficially irrelevant, metaphors. In this case, the metaphor is simple: aliens have come to our planet, but without a clear purpose (peaceful or not). Rather, an alien mother-ship appeared over a South African city one day in 1982 and stayed there until the humans decided to enter and investigate what’s in there. What they found was thousands of alien insect-like beings without a leader, without food, without something to do or go. They looked… stranded thus the human government decided to confine them initially in a camp, called District 9, just outside the city…

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How to get free signed SSL Certificates and setup secure domains in Apache and Debian

Note: This article is old and the information is obsolete. Please use Let’s Encrypt to get Free SSL/TLS Certificates.

This how-to describes the process to obtain 100% free, signed SSL Certificates from StartSSL.com and configure Apache in Debian to use these SSL certificates in your virtual domains, so that people can access your site(s) through https (i.e. https://example.com) without ever having the browser tell them the scary “this site isn’t trusted” anymore.

Before you start, you will need:

  • One or more of your functional domains which point to a server you own and have root access to. In this tutorial I’ll be using my wife’s supersyntages.gr as testbed.
  • A browser, for this tutorial Chrome, although you might prefer Firefox (see below why).
  • Root access to your server with Debian and Apache installed, with the above domains configured as VirtualHost.
  • The openssl package installed in your computer.
  • One of the following emails configured in each of the domains you want to include in the SSL certificates:
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    [email protected]

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