So far we have configured web servers to allow connections via the http protocol. However http is not secure which is why it’s better to use https.

When using https, we actually encrypt all data traffic using Symmetric and Asymmetric Encryption.

To setup the above encryption system on our Apache server, we need to first to install the ssl addon module that will allow Apache to be able to communicate on the SSL/TLS layer:

$ yum install mod_ssl

Next we need to install the software that is used for generating public-private key-pairs, so that we can create a key-pair for our web server.

$ yum install openssl

Next we create the private key and it’s csr file. We generate the private key by running the following:

$ openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -out cb.com.private.key -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:2048
...+++
.......................................+++

Here,

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a protocol that let’s you run custom scripts via the web. It’s not as commonly used as before, but you still need to know this as part of the RHCE exam objectives.

In Apache, there is a default folder where you can place scripts in, which will then get handled by the CGI protocol. This default folder is declared in the main Apache config file, here’s the relevant extract:

    #
    # Redirect: Allows you to tell clients about documents that used to
    # exist in your server's namespace, but do not anymore. The client
    # will make a new request for the document at its new location.
    # Example:
															

Virtual Hosts is one of Apache’s most powerful and commonly used feature. Virtual Hosts (aka vhosts) let’s allows you to host multiple websites on a single machine. There are 2 big advantages to this:

• Rather than needing one ip address per website, you know just need one ip address for the machine.
• A lot of machines capacity might not get used if it just hosts a single website. So having multiple websites on a single machine will make better use of your machine’s computing capacity

There are a few ways to setup vhosts, but we’ll walk through one of typical most common ways to create vhosts. In our example we have 2 websites that we want to host on our box, they are:

• example.com
• example.net

To start with we first need to create a content directory

In the previous tutorial, we saw how we can host multiple websites on the same box using vhosts. Now we’ll look at how we can configure Apache to password protect some web content. In Apache you can set up authentication so that when a user attempts to access a given folder’s content, then they will get a prompt to enter a valid username and password. There’s 2 ways to do this:

• Setup user-based security – This is where you only give one user account access to restricted part of your website
• Setup group-managed content – this is where you give a group of people access to a restricted part of your website

Setup user-based security

In this approach, we set up authentication so that there is only one user account that’s permitted to access