Installing a wildcard SSL certificate in Red Hat 6 hosted on Azure - apache

Short version: I have a wildcard certificate for a domain. We presently have 2 Apache servers, using Red Hat 6.8, running on the Azure cloud.
My question is: How do I install the wildcard certificate, and have it work properly, since the URL is (for example) http://mysite-prod01.centralus.cloudapp.azure.com -- but the certificate is for *.mydomain.com?
We're using Traffic Manager for www.mydomain.com, as the 'front' for the 2 web servers. Any ideas? I've searched and found installing SSL certificates on Red Hat, which isn't an issue, or installing certificates on Windows Azure.
There have to be a fair number of folks hosting their Red Hat servers on Azure, so this must have been solved before ... thanks in advance for your time.

Nothing to do with Azure. Install the certs as you would normally do and CNAME your domain to the traffic manager endpoint.
www.example.com IN CNAME something.trafficmanager.net
Traffic Manager works at the DNS level, so you don't handshake TLS with it, you do it with one of the VMs, depending which endpoint you get.

Related

HTTPS Connection over LAN

I am new to server management and all that HTTP stuff. I am setting up an internal server for my home to serve websites internally, my website needs to register a service worker and for that, I'll need an SSL Certificate and HTTP connection, which seems impossible in my case as all localhost or internal IPs are served over HTTP with untrusted SSL Certificates.
If anyone could suggest a way around serving websites over HTTPS with trusted certificates so that service worker can be used.
Note: I'll be using Xampp Apache for my Linux server with a static internal IP.
If you need 'trusted cert for any client', I may say "no way".
But if you need 'trusted cert for your client only', you have a way to do that.
I guess you published self-ssl cert for your Apache. In the case, you just install the cert into your client.
example: The following link tell us the case of client = Chrome on Windows.
https://peacocksoftware.com/blog/make-chrome-auto-accept-your-self-signed-certificate
If you use any programming language as a client, you may need another way to install the cert.

Get SSL to work on Google Compute Engine with a VM Instance running a webserver (nginx)?

I am a bit new to Google Compute engine and managed to get a webserver with nginx to work on my google domain and installed WordPress. HTTP access was working. Now I wanted to get HTTPS to work as well.
I noticed that I don't have SSL running and so I ended up using cloudflare, made necessary changes to my nginx server and also changed the nameserver for my webserver IP address on the Google Compute Engine. That works fine. Although, there are still some errors when accessing the IP address instead of the domain name (400 Bad Request No required SSL certificate was sent nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)).
So, I heard Google can do SSL on my google domain, but I am really stuck with the documentation, https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/securing-custom-domains-with-ssl?authuser=2#upgrading_to_managed_ssl_certificates. It talks about Google App Engine and I haven't found a documentation to apply SSL certificates to my Google Compute Engine instance. Though, I added a custom domain there, but it points to a different IP address than my webserver on the Google Compute Engine. That surely can't be the right way?
Hence, does anyone know how I can get SSL from Google to work on my webserver using a VM instance on Google Compute Engine?
(Note to myself: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-nginx-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-20-04)
It is very easy to set up SSL on Compute Engine.
STEP 1: Domain names
Determine which domain names you want SSL certificates for. Typically you want two. The naked domain (example.com) and the zone www (www.example.com). Replace example.com with your actual domain name.
Note: Let's Encrypt will not issue SSL certificates for an IP address. This also means you cannot access your web server using SSL specifying an IP address instead of a domain name. Trying this will generate an error: https://my-ip-address.com
STEP 2: Setup DNS
Change your DNS servers to point directly to your Compute Engine instance reserved static IP address. At this point, do not use CloudFlare. Let's Encrypt will talk directly to your Nginx web server. Validate that each domain name is configured correctly and that you can access your site via HTTP (http://example.com and http://www.example.com).
The following instructions are OS dependant and are for Debian based systems such as Debian and Ubuntu. There are similar steps for CentOS, Red Hat, etc.
STEP 3: Install Certbot
Certbot is the software agent for Let's Encrypt. This requires Python3 to be installed on your system. Most Google Cloud instances have Python 3 installed.
Run the following commands on your VM instance:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx
STEP 4: VPC Firewall
Make sure that ports 80 and 443 are allowed in the Google Cloud VPC Firewall.
Using firewall rules
STEP 5: Issue the SSL Certificate
Run the following command on your VM instance. Replace example.com with your domain names.
sudo certbot --nginx -d example.com -d www.example.com
Summary
Your server now has SSL configured. The SSL certificate will auto-renew. Provided that you do not change the domain names or DNS server settings, SSL will continuously function.
In the future, you may decide to offload SSL certificates to another service such as Cloudflare or a Google HTTP(S) Load Balancer. I recommend understanding how to set up SSL directly on your instance so that encryption is end-to-end. Then you can decide on SSL-offloading, caching, load balancing, auto-scaling, and more options.

Datastax Cassandra SSL

I'm new to Cassandra and just installed DataStax Community Edition 3-node cluster in our QA environment. I'd like to secure node-to-node and client-to-node communications within my cluster using GlobalSign wildcard SSL cert that I already have. So far I found posts showing how to secure cluster using your own CA but wasn't able to find any mentions on how to use wildcard certs. Basically, I'd like to install my wildcard cert to all nodes in the cluster and use DNS A-records to match node IP address and the DNS name (e.g. 10.100.1.1 > node01.domain.com).
Is that even possible? Any help is greatly appreciated!
Mike
Using anything but certificate pinning as described in the reference is insecure, as Cassandra will not validate if the hostname the certificate was created for is actually the host trying to connect. See CASSANDRA-9220 for details.

SSL: where is the certificate hosted? when does the verification occurs?

I am quite confused here:
I use DNSMadeeasy to manage my DNS. I have two apps.
One is Heroku hosted, and has https on https://example.com - Heroku has many great tutorials to setup the certificate, it hasn't been a problem.
The other one is a wordpress, hosted in 1and1 (though it shouldn't matter here), and is reachable at http://subdomain.example.com and we want it to be available at https://subdomain.example.com
1and1 does sell SSL certificate, but their automated setup works only when one uses their services for DNS also, as they say. Their support says it should be DNSMadeEasy which should be hosting our SSL certificate. I have the feeling it is not true, because for https://example.com, DNSMadeEasy was never involved.
Questions:
When does certificate querying occurs? Before, After, or in parallel of DNS resolution?
Who is hosting a certificate? The DNS provider? The server (accessible like a sitemap.xml at the root for instance)? A third party?
To enlarge the case, in general if I have a personal server with a fix IP, how can I communicate through https with a valid certificate?
In my case, how can I get my way out of it to make https://subdomain.example.com work?
You are right for not believing the 1and1 suggestion.
To answer your questions:
When does certificate querying occurs? Before, After, or in parallel
of DNS resolution?
A client resolves domain name to an IP address first. So DNS resolution happens first.
Who is hosting a certificate?
The server (in simplistic terms) hosts the certificate.
When a client wants to connect to your site (via HTTPS) it will first establish a secure connection with that IP address on port 443 (this is why usually (without SNI) you can only have one SSL certificate per IP address). As part of this process (which is called handshake) a client can also specify a server name (so-called server name extension) - this is a domain name of your site. This is useful if you have an SSL certificate that is valid for multiple domains.
A good/detailed explanation how it works can be found here
http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html
if I have a personal server with a fix IP, how can I communicate
through https with a valid certificate?
Your server will need to be able to respond on port 443 and have/host an SSL certificate for a domain that resolves to that IP address.
In my case, how can I get my way out of it to make
https://subdomain.example.com work?
You need to purchase a certificate for subdomain.example.com and install it on the wordpress server.
Usually in hosted solution like yours you have 2 options:
Buy the SSL certificate via the provider (1and1 in your case) - a simpler option, they will configure everything for you.
Buy the SSL certificate yourself. Here you will most likely need to login to your 1and1/Wordpress management interface and generate a CSR (essentially a certificate request). Then you purchase the SSL certificate using this CSR and then you can install it via the same management interface.
The process will look similar to this:
http://wpengine.com/support/add-ssl-site/

Do I need to install SSL on my server?

I have a virtual server with a few websites on it. To be honest I know next to nothing about SSL. When Itry to log in to my servers Web Host Manager or any of my sites Cpanels I get a screen (In chrome) saying "This website is not trusted". Is this because the server needs to have SSL installed on it?
Maybe it's not even to do with SSL, but any explanation is appreciated.
SSL secures your conecction between your browser and the server. If you have important data there you should install SSL to protect your connection from "sniffing".
SSL is network protocol so you have to install it or enable it on the server.
here is resource for installing/enabling SSL on Apache server:
http://www.digicert.com/ssl-certificate-installation-apache.htm
and here is how to install/enable SSL on IIS:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299875