Ah, and look at this! A lovely orange tinge, meaning, do you know what?
We've got to the end of this module, and you're a little
bit closer to your administration goals.
Congratulations! So we've been taking a look at our Apache HTTPS server.
So we've installed Apache; that's obviously fairly necessary.
We've tested our access to our HTTP site, which was fine.
But of course, this then doesn't give me the security,
the encryption of data over the wire that we probably want.
We set up our hostname, or verified the hostname, and we
could see that on Ubuntu, our hostname was verifiable by
DNS being managed by systemd.
We've created our self‑signed certificates, and we were making sure
that the common name we added to our certificate matched then what was
available through our hostname resolution.
We set up the SSL configuration within our default SSL site.
We enabled that site.
Remember, we had then the a2enmod, and a2en, or enable site.
So we looked at the way in which Apache manages the web server in very much
this modular configuration way. We tested our access, and we were able to
test it with our command‑line browser w3m, but we also saw that we could
test the certificate information using our openssl command and the s_client
module. But that's it.
We've got a very simple HTTPS website set up, but we can see the
difficulty in trying to access a self‑signed certificate, and some
browsers won't allow you to access self‑signed certificates.
So we need something a little bit better, and that's going to
come in the form of our certificate authority.
And that's what we're going to be looking at in our next module, where we go
through and show how you can set up your own certificate server and have a
trust relationship to the issuing authority so we don't need to worry about
trusting each server certificate.
So really important if you want to set your own certificate authority for your organization and have it managed through Linux.