DNS: How it Works

January 11, 2017

DNS is a critical service that everyone uses every time they surf the web. Many people don't understand how it works; especially when migrating a website or service to a new host. Click to read a quick overview of how DNS works.

tags:

• DNS
• DNS Lookup
• Domain Name Service
• dig
• nslookup
• Networking

---

NGINX, ALPN and HTTP/2 on CentOS7

December 14, 2016

By now we've all heard about the fancy new lightning fast HTTP/2 protocol, right? Fortunately, the latest versions of NGINX support HTTP/2. Unfortunately, most distributions are still stuck on OpenSSL < 1.0.2

tags:

• NGINX
• HTTP/2
• OpenSSL
• Use the Source
• CentOS7
• Chrome

---

Install certbot on Amazon Linux

December 13, 2016

There is no packaged version of certbot for Amazon Linux so we have to download and set it up manually. Running it the first time will install all dependencies and should then work to create and renew certificates. Unfortunately, the first run on Amazon Linux gives us and error instead of a working certbot. :(

tags:

• AWS
• EC2
• SSL
• Let's Encrypt
• certbot

---

SSL for Websites

November 18, 2016

The goals of SSL/HTTPS are to provide a secure channel of communication. You should be able to trust that the SSL certificate you receive was actually issued to the website you are visiting and that it is non-trivial for a third party to read the data passing between the client and server.

tags:

• ssl
• https
• http/2
• security
• certificates
• Let's Encrypt
• Networking

---