Given that SSL and TLS, especially v1.0, suffer from serious security issues (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#TLS) I thought it would be a good idea to use the latest and more secure version of it: v1.2. On CentOS 6.4 the openssl version included is quite old and doesn’t support TLS v1.1 and 1.2. So, first of all we have to install the latest version 1.0.1e, it can be done compiling from sources or by adding a third party repository; I chose the latter. …

Let’s say we have a WordPress blog and we would like to encrypt our login pages and the whole back-end of the site. There are many ways to do it, but since I already have a nginx instance configured as reverse proxy running in front of Apache I’ll use it to protect my admin pages and logins. In this page I’ll not cover Apache’s configuration, which, by the way, is trivial to say the least, so please refer to this other post: Apache + nginx as reverse proxy. …

OpenVPN is the de facto standard VPN free open source software; it is widely used, tested, well documented and also included in the CentOS repos (EPEL). .:. Server side configuration yum install openvpn easy-rsa dnsmasq When yum is done installing the required packages, copy the sample config file. cp /usr/share/doc/openvpn-*/sample/sample-config-files/server.conf /etc/openvpn Uncomment/edit the following lines in /etc/openvpn/server.conf: port 1194 proto udp dev tun ca ca.crt cert server.crt key server.key dh dh4096. …

Yesterday’s night I installed a test machine to play with KVM and some other stuff, obviously the OS of choice is the trusty CentOS. I did a pretty minimal net-install but decided to install gnome desktop environment anyway because why not, not that it will be of much use, but still. Anyway, since the machine is an headless server it’s mandatory to be able to control it remotely, like the past 2 or 3 times, I installed XRDP expecting everything will be fine and working without any problem. …

With Samba being the clusterfuck it is, every time a new version is released you have to expect something to be messed up. This time they added a bunch of new features like MS Active Directory support, too bad that now the simple directory sharing is broken/not working like it did before. Something like 1 year ago I wrote a small guide about how to setup a Samba share on Centos 6 and I used the same smb. …