Apache Web Servers and SSL Encryption

Carlie Fairchild — Tue, 12 May 2015 14:47:58 +0000

Congratulations! You’ve decided to set up a Web site. The site might be for your personal use, for sharing family pictures, for a blog, for an SaaS application, or any number of other possibilities. In all of those cases, people will access your site using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP has evolved and improved through the years, but one thing about it hasn’t changed—the fact that all of the traffic sent on an HTTP connection is unencrypted.

The bottom line is that whether you want or need to do so, adding HTTPS to a site you’re running isn’t very hard to do. In this Geek Guide, I walk through what SSL/TLS is (and isn’t), how you can create or buy a certificate, how to install that certificate into an Apache server and then how to configure Apache such that a subset of URLs on your system are covered by SSL.

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Two Pi R 2: Web Servers

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 20:25:37 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

In my last article, I talked about how even though an individual Raspberry Pi is not that redundant, two Pis are. I described how to set up two Raspberry Pis as a fault-tolerant file server using the GlusterFS clustered filesystem. Well, now that we have redundant, fault-tolerant storage shared across two Raspberry Pis, we can use that as a foundation to build other fault-tolerant services. In this article, I describe how to set up a simple Web server cluster on top of the Raspberry Pi foundation we already have.

Just in case you didn't catch the first column, I'll go over the setup from last month. I have two Raspberry Pis: Pi1 and Pi2. Pi1 has an IP address of 192.168.0.121, and Pi2 has 192.168.0.122. I've set them up as a GlusterFS cluster, and they are sharing a volume named gv0 between them. I also mounted this shared volume on both machines at /mnt/gluster1, so they each could access the shared storage at the same time. Finally, I performed some failure testing. I mounted this shared storage on a third machine and launched a simple script that wrote the date to a file on the shared storage. Then, I experimented with taking down each Raspberry Pi individually to confirm the storage stayed up.

Now that I have the storage up and tested, I'd like to set up these Raspberry Pis as a fault-tolerant Web cluster. Granted, Raspberry Pis don't have speedy processors or a lot of RAM, but they still have more than enough resources to act as a Web server for static files. Although the example I'm going to give is very simplistic, that's intentional—the idea is that once you have validated that a simple static site can be hosted on redundant Raspberry Pis, you can expand that with some more sophisticated content yourself.

Install Nginx

Although I like Apache just fine, for a limited-resource Web server serving static files, something like nginx has the right blend of features, speed and low resource consumption that make it ideal for this site. Nginx is available in the default Raspbian package repository, so I log in to the first Raspberry Pi in the cluster and run:


$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nginx

Once nginx installed, I created a new basic nginx configuration at /mnt/gluster1/cluster that contains the following config:


server {
  root /mnt/gluster1/www;
  index index.html index.htm;
  server_name twopir twopir.example.com;

  location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
  }
}

Note: I decided to name the service twopir, but you would change this to whatever hostname you want to use for the site. Also notice that I set the document root to /mnt/gluster1/www. This way, I can put all of my static files onto shared storage so they are available from either host.

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