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                              Late to the party

I've been blogging for 23 years as of today. This is also the first day this
blog is being served up via https:. All I had to do was just install the
latest version of Apache on my server [1].

It took several days, but I got the latest version of Apache compiled and
installed on my server. Yes, I did it the hard way. What better way of
knowing how things work than doing it the hard way. I then spent Saturday
updating the configuration. There were a few changes, like NameVirtualHost
[2] being deprecated, and having to add “Protocols [3] h2 h2c http/1.1” and
“Require [4] all granted”.

Once that was done and the new server was up and running, then I dove into
the whole “Encrypt All The Things!” rabbit hole (I know, I know, 2015 called
and said I was late to the party). A recent post [5] of mine made it to The
Orange Site [6] and fully half of the comments were about the disturbing lack
of [DELETED-faith-DELETED] TLS (Transport Layer Security) I had. Of course.
Fortunately, Apache [7] has a module [8] to handle certificates from Let's
Encrypt [9] (or others places that support the “certificate update dance”
protocol). Unfortunately, there are subtleties not mentioned in the
documentation. Like the MDCACertificateFile directive (which I need for my
setup—don't ask) not being documented. Or the fact that if you make any type
of mistake (like using the wrong domain name because you cut-n-paste the
configuration from one host into another and forgot to make the domain name
change, or using “SSLEngine on” in the wrong place, or forgetting to add acme
tls/1 to the Protocols directive) everything goes pear shaped and Let's
Encrypt will rate limit and … ugh. I'm just lucky I have a few domains to
practice on before enabling it for my main sites.

But I was able to finish in time for the 23^rd anniversary of my blog and get
that stupid little lock on my site.

You're welcome.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2022/11/28.1
[2] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#namevirtualhost
[3] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#protocols
[4] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_authz_core.html#require
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2022/09/22.1
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32969374
[7] https://httpd.apache.org/
[8] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_md.html
[9] https://letsencrypt.org/

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