Author: Dave

Done it!

Courtesy of letsencrypt.org

As an aside, I got a pleasant call from my domain registration provider, 1and1.co.uk . The chap was (I think) quietly impressed with what I had done so far. Coincidentally, he called just as I was figuring out how to apply SSL to my website, offering to help set it up on my behalf (and make a little money for 1and1.co.uk ).

I told him I was quite happy getting to grips with the nitty-gritty of it, and didn’t require nor want any assistance. In fact, the harder it is, the more I’ll learn, I think I said.

I’ll figure out how to enable comments on this blog. Anyone from 1and1.co.uk feel like leaving me a “hiya!”, feel free to do so 😃

I’m rather glad he didn’t look at it yesterday, when it still had its puerile front page.

Installing Owncloud next – I’ve done it before, but on a Raspberry Pi, so this’ll be a little different. After that, a mail server?? I say that with some trepidation. Wish me luck! 

Since my last post (this afternoon), I have configured a domain name, this very one you see before you, digitaltinker.co.uk and discovered how arsey it is reconfiguring a WordPress site to a newly acquired domain name.  I think I did it how it really shouldn’t be done, but I got it working in the end.  Alas, a feature of WordPress, the flexible permalinks, stopped working.  They would only work on the setting applied before the domain name change.  So I reinstalled WordPress and reinstated my original two posts from before the changes.

As an aside, I got my domain name from 1and1 who at the moment are giving it away, free of charge and the phrase one and one just starts Jimmy by Tool playing in my head.  Everything rocks!

I’m going to bed.

Morning after edit – next job, SSL!!

The purpose of this site is for me to learn how to set up a web server on Amazon’s cloud with Ubuntu preinstalled and on that install a bunch of stuff, to this end, the website you see now.

So, once Amazon’s all-free options were chosen (One core CPU, 1GB RAM, 30GB SSD space) and Amazon’s built in firewall configured to allow SSH connections (and http) , I CLI’d in to install apache2, php, mysql and a few other bits and pieces. Reading tutorials, (and rarely failing to fully understand the commands), I muddled through the basic configuration of apache and MySql and WordPress installation (I could have ticked the box that said “preconfigure my server to be a WordPress server please, thankyou very much” but I didn’t, coz that would’ve been cheating).

While trying to get it working on SSL, I discovered a free certificate issuing authority (letsencrypt, from Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the University of Michigan) with configuration software to ease the set-up of SSL, but unfortuately will only work if you have your own domain, not (just) a subdomain on Amazon.