There are a couple of steps that are needed to be done

Set Up a SSL certificate

Follow the guide at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSSL to setup a certificate.  It is easier to follow this guide rather than me rewriting it.

I didn’t fill in all of the contact details accurately.  I don’t want people who find my site to get my details.  Bah!

A couple of gotchas:

1. Make sure your country code is only two letters long in the countryName field
2. Make an unencrypted key — you want your mythbox to start automatically and not need a password, don’t you!

Set Up Apache to serve via SSL

Again, this is based on the great help provided at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=791432

1. Change directory to /etc/apache2
2. Edit the file ports.conf
   • Change

     NameVirtualHost *:80
     Listen 80
     

     to

     NameVirtualHost *:443
     #Listen 80
     

3. Edit the file sites-available/default-mythbuntu and change

   <VirtualHost *:80>
   

   to

   <VirtualHost *:443>
   

   and then add the following:

   SSLEngine On
   SSLCertificateFile /home/username/myCA/server_crt.pem
   SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/username/myCA/private/server_key.pem
   

   • Note: I differ with the advice in the article over the SSL files to use. I think they should be the server/site certificates rather the the certificate authority (CA) certificates.
4. Restart the Apache server:

   sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

All Done

Now you should have no server on port 80 and your mythweb served via SSL.

One of the problems that I have is that I had a directory in which I started with a lot of code and over time have moved subdirectories into their own and then I’ve deleted them from the main directory, but the svn-to-git process correctly keeps these delete directories in my history. However, I don’t want them, I just want to keep some of the history.

Fortunately git has a great way of handling these things with the filter-branch command, but it can be a tad complicated. I was unable to get any of the examples I came across to work until I found David Underhill’s post git: forever remove files or folders from history.

So what did I do?

git filter-branch --prune-empty --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch deleted-directory/*" HEAD
rm -rf .git/refs/original/ && git reflog expire --all && git gc --aggressive --prune

The only difference from what David suggested (and this comes from the comment) is the --prune-empty flag.

…and it’s all good. The unwanted directories are purged from history and my repo is nice and small again.

So, to view this blog I use Firefox with NoScript, RequestPolicy and of course Adblock Plus.

In NoScript I’ve marked as untrusted quantserve.com, skimlinks.com and snap.com.

Adblock Plus has the EasyPrivacy+EasyList subscription and RequestPolicy just blocks everything by default.

I know that WordPress needs to make money to provide free services (like this blog) but I don’t want to be tracked and overwhelmed by hangers-on. I hope you get something from this and maybe improve your surfing experience.

I may add another post with the other add-ons that I use in Firefox.

…well maybe not all the good ideas.

How about: random stuff that I feel like sharing.