Let’s use letsencrypt

Few folks told me that while they try to access my website vinaybabu.in they get nasty message from browsers that its unsafe to browse through my website. That’s because I was using self-signed certificate to encrypt the internet traffic. I didn’t want to go with CA vendors who charge more than the cost of my #raspberrypi.

After googling got to know about letsencrypt which provides free trusted SSL certificates. I would like to thank below tech blog / link from techmint for installing letsencrypt on my pi. Only catch is that we need to renew certificate within 90 days.

http://www.tecmint.com/install-free-lets-encrypt-ssl-certificate-for-apache-on-debian-and-ubuntu/

To automate renewal of letencrypt (certbot) certificate we can use below script taken from the link https://www.upcloud.com/support/install-lets-encrypt-apache/

 #!/bin/sh
if ! /usr/local/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto certonly -tvv --keep --webroot -w <web root folder> -d vinaybabu.in > /var/log/letsencrypt/renew.log 2>&1 ; then
   echo Automated renewal failed:
   cat /var/log/letsencrypt/renew.log
   exit 1
fi
apachectl graceful

Note: Do change the <web root folder> with actual path

Save the above script in /root folder. I’ve saved this script as auto_renew.sh

Finally, create a new crontab entry as under to run the script every 80 days. Threshold to renew Letsencrypt (certbot) certificate is 30 days.

#crontab -e <run as root>

0 0 */80 * * /root/auto_renew.sh

To check crontab entries use below command

#crontab -l <run as root>

That’s it! folks can access my website from any type of device or browser without any issues. I’ve got free trusted certificate and enabled secure and encrypted traffic while accessing my website.

Thanks much @letsencrypt and @tecmint.

Disclaimers:

Image’s courtesy: letsencrypt.org

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Squirrelmail IMAP 111 : Connection refused

After I started using K-9 Mail on my Oneplus 2, I hardly accessed webmail service hosted on my #RaspberryPi. I wanted to send an urgent note but when I tried to login, got a error message as under.

Error connecting to IMAP server: localhost 111 : Connection refused

As usual, I googled for hours in between my office work 😛 but could not find out the solution. I started rewinding myself to recall the changes made to the Pi, then suddenly remembered that a change was made to /etc/hosts by replacing ‘localhost’ with my server name…

Alas! I ran squirrelmail-configure command and updated server settings which resolved the issue.

Now I realize change management plays an important role in any level be it organization or personal use since the task of managing change is not an easy one!!

Happy Pi-ing!!