Tag Archives: security

SSL support for Nginx

In order to take part in the “Reset the NET Campaign” (see the previous post) and to honour the first anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations, I configured my self-hosted server to support HTTPS/SSL requests. Now you can reach this site also at https://raspberryblog.de. Furthermore, I highly recommend using the Firefox HTTPS everywhere plugin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to encrypt your traffic while visiting all sites supporting SSL.

Here’s a brief tutorial how it works: If you haven’t installed Nginx, yet, please see the documentation at nginx.org. For an existing installation, create a subdirectory in /etc/nginx to store your SSL certificates.

sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/ssl
cd /etc/nginx/ssl

Next, create the server key and certificate signing request. Start by creating the private server key. During this process, you will be asked to enter a passphrase. Be sure to remember this phrase! If you forget it or lose it, you will not be able to access the certificate again.

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What performs better on a RasPi: Apache, Lighttpd or Nginx?

As I’m hosting my blog on a Raspberry Pi, I did some research on the web about it’s performance as a server. I started this site with Apache and migrated after a while to Lighttpd which already reduced server response time (3.6 seconds, according to Google’s PageSpeed Insights it reached 72/100 points) and improved performance. With an DSL upload speed of only 676 kbit/s one shouldn’t expect miracles anyway. Google’s PageSpeed results, which suggested to make a couple of changes to my site, and a comparison of Lighttpd vs. Nginx convinced me to migrate to Nginx.

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