It has been a few days since my last post, however, the studying continued on each day. I covered MariaDB, Apache, and TLS just recently. I really enjoyed the topics that I covered over the past few days as I was able to directly apply them to real-world situations with this website.
What made this especially fun was that my website is run off all of these. Until today though the site was just run over HTTP, after reading up on getting TLS working on Apache I figured, why not just put into practice what I learned by adding TLS support to this site. You may notice that now the site is fully https, and it redirects you to https automatically now. I did not go for the expensive ones, as I don’t sell anything on this site, so there was no need. So I just went for the DV (domain verification) certificate from Comodo.
I just needed to install two packages to get things going:
# yum install mod_ssl crypto-utils
From there I ran genkey to get my csr.
# genkey www.therootuser.com
Just follow the
Then I just edited the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/therootuser.conf
SSLEngine on SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 SSLCipherSuite HIGH:3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!SEED:!IDEA SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/www_therootuser_com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/www.therootuser.com.key SSLCACertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/www_therootuser_com.ca-bundle
These were all added to the <VirtualHost *:443> section of the conf file
As this process took me time to figure out and get working properly it, of course, slowed me down on the Apache section, so I’m still finishing that chapter up and will take what I learn from there and apply it to make my site better.
With MariaDB, most of that was just review material, and the only syntax I think I’ll need to work on to get down correctly is creating users, and granting rights to them. For my purposes, it’s not something I really have to deal with, but it will still be useful to know.
For now, I will continue on with the Apache chapter, and try and apply things to my site, as well as in lab situations. At least I’m sure on this topic I will do well on the exam. Which knowing my luck, they won’t ask anything about. Usually how it goes. Check back tomorrow for more on Apache, and my next topics on the RHCE.
Cheers,
Ivan Windon – RHCSA
