Apache 2 & SSL

Just activated SSL on my apache2 VirtualHost for this page.
Pretty straight forward. Just “a2enmod ssl” to get ssl activated.
After that i’ve chosen to enable SSL specifically in my beutler.nl virtualhost.

Configuration looks like this now:

<VirtualHost *>
....
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /dir/to/.cert
SSLCertificateKeyFile /dir/to/privatekey
NameVirtualHost *:443
Listen 80
Listen 443

Make sure in your ports.conf is also mentioned: NameVirtualHost *:80

In case of questions – let me know 🙂

Roundcubemail

Just added roundcubemail to my dovecot imap server.
It's a nice and clean Dovecot Webfrontend (or imap webfrontend).

Pretty straight forward install.

http://roundcube.net/

First i tried to use the apt-get install roundcube function but it ended up in installing like 25 packages i didn't need in the end. I can really recommend going the manual procedure and downloading the rc1.0 version. Very clean UI and just works 🙂

Dovecot & imap

Just wanted to install dovecot-imapd when i noticed my dovecot-core installation was somehow corrupt. Got error message like these from top to bottom:

dpkg: error processing dovecot-core (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of dovecot-common: dovecot-common depends on dovecot-core; however: Package dovecot-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing dovecot-common (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured Errors were encountered while processing: dovecot-core dovecot-common

When checking /var/log/syslog i noticed this error message:

Mar 24 20:50:22 h2077265 dovecot: master: Fatal: service(pop3) access(/usr/lib/dovecot/pop3) failed: No such file or directory

And guess what – i just had to make the directory and after that i was able to apt-get purge. Everything has been reinstalled again. Now i was also able to apt-get install dovecot-imapd. After enabling imap in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf (protocols = imap pop3) and a restart of dovecot everything was working.

Another one done. Now lets go for webmail 😉

[Apache] Name based virtual host

So after quite some time now i became annoyed of my FQDN and wanted something easier to read/share. I’ve bought a domain from godaddy.com (anyone knows something better?) and wanted to add it to my existing webhost. After setting the A-record to my static server IP it took only about 10 minutes to get the change live. Now as my root server (debian v7.x) only got one IP and already some other sites on it i had to use Apache name based virtual hosts. I never really used it in the past. Other domains i am hosting are just pointed to my old FQDN and the folder where the sites are stored in. PRETTY LAME!

Now virtual hosts are a lot easier to use then i expected. I just added a new file into the directory /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. You can use the default web page as pretty good example.

Notice that most pages advice you to start with NameVirtualHost *:80 to enable name based virtual hosts. You only need this if it’s not included before already! In my example my apache2.22 already had this activated when including the ports.conf configuration file. After that i went straight forward and added this configuration into my newly created file (in sites-enabled):

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin a@bc.de
ServerName www.beutler.nl
ServerAlias beutler.nl *.beutler.nl

DocumentRoot /directory/beutler.nl
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /directory/beutler.nl>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/beutler.nl.error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/beutler.nl.access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Now i restarted apache and it just worked. That easy 🙂 Of course i also moved all other pages i host to virtual hosts and changed URL forwarding (from the domain provider) to a new A-record. Looks a lot more professional now.

So what – i am still learning 🙂 If you got any questions just let me know.

New Blog

Hi all,

i decided to finally get a blog running (yeah i know it’s 2014).
Basically this blog is about my day to day experience with IT stuff.
At the moment it’s pretty much only web/server hosting and playing around with my raspberry pi. I feel like a lot of the information in the internet is outdated and most of the times blogs (can) contain a lot of useful tips and tricks. So hopefully this will be one more of those neat sites.

Enjoy your week.

best, Niko