I got myself one of those cheap dedicated hosts for tooling around and learning stuff (I know, more money than sense, but it's cheaper than owning a boat).

It is RH 9, CPanel, and all the other LAMP goodies. Now I'd like to dabble with SSL. Create a bogus store, just so I know what goes behind it. I'd also like to play with nph-proxy from a secured server as well (which if successful, pays for itself versus anonymizer).

I already know I need a secure certificate installed on my server
I know what to do with the various shopping card & proxy apps

What I don't know is

how to obtain a secure certificate
where to find a cheap cert
how to install it on my system
how not to fubar cpanel installing it on my system
what the heck to do with open ssl that's on my system
how to make the cert available to 3 domains on my system


So what I need is a dummies guide so I don't bother you good people with idiot questions like how do I do cert.

Any suggestions (other than take a long walk off a short pier) ?

freessl has a $5 temporary cert that you could use for training

http://freessl.com/freessl/freessl.html

(I know, more money than sense, but it's cheaper than owning a boat). Almost everything is cheaper than owning a boat...:D

This thread at the CPanel Forums (http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8888&highlight=SSL+Installation) is a pretty decent guide to setting up an SSL in WHM...

Originally posted by Watcher_TVI
Almost everything is cheaper than owning a boat...:D

Thanks for the link ... and the laugh!

edit, NM

Originally posted by CD Burnt
freessl has a $5 temporary cert that you could use for training

http://freessl.com/freessl/freessl.html
$39 is not that much for a StarterSSL too

www.ev1servers.net I believe they offer them for 50$

Originally posted by TheWalrus
www.ev1servers.net I believe they offer them for 50$
Yes, and they have install guides for every OS and variant.

If you only want to get a certificate to play with, why pay at all? Certificate authorities (the guys you pay for a certificate) only provide a service of verifying that your SSL certificate genuinely represents your company; it's entirely possible to run a service without a verified SSL certificate (in fact, it's quite common in the world of open source project hosting where corporate entities for different projects quite often don't exist).

http://www.verisign.com/support/tlc/csr/ssleay/v01.html

Originally posted by Jay Cornwall
If you only want to get a certificate to play with, why pay at all? Certificate authorities (the guys you pay for a certificate) only provide a service of verifying that your SSL certificate genuinely represents your company; it's entirely possible to run a service without a verified SSL certificate (in fact, it's quite common in the world of open source project hosting where corporate entities for different projects quite often don't exist).

http://www.verisign.com/support/tlc/csr/ssleay/v01.html

Right: you can probably find a certificate authority (CA) package for your Linux distribution.