https in cpanel

working with someone who has a cpanel server. they want https on it. cpanel doesn't do that by default. google doesn't reveal much in the way of tutorials for this, so here's a note for people to find.

1. generate a key pair and certificate using the Generate a SSL Certificate & Signing Request page. Copy the certificate onto your clipboard.
2. go to the Install a SSL Certificate and Setup the Domain page. Paste in the certificate. click fetch on the key text field and it should populate that field for you. Set the username to nobody so that all users can use this key pair.
3. When you save that page, apache will reload and you'll get https service on port 443, with a self-signed certificate (and so with consequent certificate mismatch error messages). But your existing domains won't work on that server - they'll go to the default cpanel parking page - cpanel only configures its virtual hosts on port 80... grr
4. So next I made an apache mod_rewrite rule in the VirtualHost directive for the port 443 virtual server. That causes all the internal sites appear on port 443.

       RewriteEngine on
       RewriteRule   ^(.+)          http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [P]
   

   That's an awkward hack to have to add to cpanel's generated config, but it seems to work (modulo invalid certificate warnings that all users ignore anyway)...

There's also a hole in the way that that rewrite rule is implemented: with a custom http client, you can probably make this server act as an arbitrary proxy for you, depending on mod_proxy configuration.

DHmPC

I have a server running inside EC2. It gets its network details using dhcp.

ubuntu@s0:~$ hostname
s0.barwen.ch
ubuntu@s0:~$ hostname --fqdn
hostname: Name or service not known

grr.

This happens pretty much every time the VM reboots. Its something to do with getting a new private IP address each time it reboots.

Although this manages to work:

hostname --all-fqdns
s0.barwen.ch polm.pl stacheldraht.it s0.barwen.ch

The autoconfigured resolv.conf looks like this:

nameserver 172.16.0.23
domain eu-west-1.compute.internal
search eu-west-1.compute.internal

and if I comment out or remove both the domain and search lines, then everything works...

Those lines are wrong anyway - this machine is in my barwen.ch domain. It just happens to be hosted in amazon's network...