SSLcertificate

Making an SSL Certificate in Debian for apache/zope https access

*Sometimes debian installations do it for you automatically, sometimes not ... probably depending on the history of your upgrades. Here is a technique for doing it manually for the apache , mod-ssl server which allows your zope pages to be served with a https: type URL*

• The debian libapache-mod-ssl-doc says to create certificates with mod-ssl-makecert (which was broken at time of writing; you may need to use the makecert.sh supplied in /usr/share/doc/libapache-mod-ssl/examples )
• A much better solution (in french) is http://www.linux-sottises.net/en_apache_install.php
• here is a quick shell script that avoids the trap of creating a certificate that requires manual authentication of apache restarts (not good during un-attended reboots): put this is makecert.sh and run it.

#!/bin/sh
cd /etc/apache
openssl genrsa 1024 > ssl.key/server.key
openssl req -new -key ssl.key/server.key -out ssl.csr/server.csr
openssl req -x509 -days 10000 -key ssl.key/server.key \
                              -in  ssl.csr/server.csr \
                              -out ssl.crt/server.crt
cd -

• oh ya, you will of course need the openssl debian package for this to work

References

• Excellent French HOWTO Zope Apache SSL ZEO