Step 1: Generate a Private Key

The first step is to create your RSA Private Key. This key is a 1024 bit RSA key which is encrypted using Triple-DES and stored in a PEM format so that it is readable as ASCII text.

Step 2: Generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request)

Once the private key is generated a Certificate Signing Request can be generated. The CSR is then used in one of two ways. Ideally, the CSR will be sent to a Certificate Authority, such as Thawte or Verisign who will verify the identity of the requestor and issue a signed certificate. The second option is to self-sign the CSR, which will be demonstrated in the next section.

During the generation of the CSR, you will be prompted for several pieces of information. These are the X.509 attributes of the certificate. One of the prompts will be for “Common Name (e.g., YOUR name)”. It is important that this field be filled in with the fully qualified domain name of the server to be protected by SSL. If the website to be protected will be https://www.yatblog.com, then enter www.yatblog.com at this prompt. If you want to create a so called “wildcard” certificate, which means the same certificate can be used on an unlimited number of subdomains, just enter an asterisk as the hostname, in our example that would be *.yatblog.com. The command to generate the CSR is as follows:

Step 3: Remove Passphrase from Key

One unfortunate side-effect of the pass-phrased private key is that Apache will ask for the pass-phrase each time the web server is started. Obviously this is not necessarily convenient as someone will not always be around to type in the pass-phrase, such as after a reboot or crash. mod_ssl includes the ability to use an external program in place of the built-in pass-phrase dialog, however, this is not necessarily the most secure option either. It is possible to remove the Triple-DES encryption from the key, thereby no longer needing to type in a pass-phrase. If the private key is no longer encrypted, it is critical that this file only be readable by the root user! If your system is ever compromised and a third party obtains your unencrypted private key, the corresponding certificate will need to be revoked. With that being said, use the following command to remove the pass-phrase from the key:

The newly created server.key file has no passphrase in it anymore.

Step 4: Generating a Self-Signed Certificate

At this point you will need to generate a self-signed certificate because you either don’t plan on having your certificate signed by a CA, or you wish to test your new SSL implementation while the CA is signing your certificate. This temporary certificate will generate an error in the client browser to the effect that the signing certificate authority is unknown and not trusted.

To generate a temporary certificate which is good for 365 days, issue the following command:

Step 5: Installing the Private Key and Certificate

When Apache with mod_ssl is installed, it creates several directories in the Apache config directory. The location of this directory will differ depending on how Apache was compiled.

Step 6: Configuring SSL Enabled Virtual Hosts

If you want to redirect connections to the standard, unencrypted port 80, simply use the following lines:

Step 7: Restart Apache and Test

Share This

And so here are my recommendations:

1st Place: O’Reilly
Because it is a good starting point for almost any programmer to search for code. The reason why you should start with O’Reilly is simply that the code you’ll find here will not only work, but is also beautifully written and well-formed.

2nd Place: QuickRef
QuickRef offers a great AJAXified interface that let’s you find source code for something you don’t even exactly know the name of. It also shows you related info based on your search which is useful for further research you might not even have thought about before. The resources QuickRef uses (it’s a meta search engine) are great and well-respected websites on their own, thus the source code should be of high quality most of the time.

3rd Place: Koders
Koders is a great resource as well. It might often be the last place of hope to find source code to programmers coding in more exotic languages like Ada and Eiffel. But it should be also of great value to more mainstream programmers using Java or C++.

Summary
You should use a combination of these search engines for your daily work, because all of them use different resources, so you might be able to find source code for a specific problem with one search engine, while you might not succeed with another one. So, it might be a good idea to bookmark this page for your future reference. I will also update it as soon as I find out about a new one.

Hope this helps you guys to write better code, more efficiently. It certainly helped me.

Update: There’s a new kid in town called Codefetch, after some reviewing I’ll update the comparison appropriately.

Share This

Share This

As Visual Basic 6 gets older and older, more and more problems start to appear. Microsoft stopped supporting it, hoping most developers would migrate to Visual Basic.Net. But a lot of companies still have huge investments in Visual Basic 6 code, thus not allowing them to simply migrate to the .Net framework. As other technologies like operating systems evolve (remember Vista which is due to release sometime this millennium?), the problems programming for a platform which is not being supported anymore, get bigger and heavier. Not being sure if VB 6 applications will work flawlessly on Windows Vista and Microsoft not planning to do something on this part, means it is about time to start thinking of migrating your code (even if it seems impossible to some companies). If a VB 6 application is running on a dedicated Windows 2000 or XP machine (a point of sale system for example) and it may continue to do so for a couple of years, then I guess it’s okay and you still have plenty of time before migrating. But that’s not the case for most applications. So which options do you have?

Sun comes to the rescue! Sun has a new project called “Semplice”. It made its first appearance on the JavaOne summit. It enables Visual Basic 6 developers to code for the Java platform, while not having to learn the .Net framework which scared a lot of VB 6 developers because of its overly complex nature (although in my opinion it kinda resembles the Java platform). At the current stage, the project is still very young and immature. It allows you to import your VB 6 source code and compile it into a Java class file. This way you get cross-platform compatibility out of the box! But it doesn’t compile every source code you can find. Windows 32 API calls are not supported. As well as OCX (and probably Dynamic Link Libraries, too). So you might eventually have to rewrite parts of your code or cut some features to enable compatibility. This project seams very promising, but I kinda wish it had been done a few years earlier, so that right after Microsoft stopped supporting VB 6, you would have had a mature, working project, enabling you to migrate to the Java platform. Let’s see how fast Sun continues development on this project.

Since I used to count myself to the Visual Basic 6 developer crowd as well, I do not hate them, although I abandoned VB 6 for Java quite a while ago. I still like its simplicity and its efficiency. Often times I wish Java was a bit more like Visual Basic, easier to use and a lot faster to get results with, especially while doing GUI programming.

To end this, I have a valuable tip to all you desperate VB 6 developers (and Java developers maybe too). There are a few good alternatives out there. RealSoftware’s REALbasic provides great features (even cross-platform compatibility) and greatly resembles the look and feel of VB 6. It is being continuously developed and its company, plans to support it for as long as they exist, as they do not have any other products at the moment. They even provide a free edition for Linux (you can’t compile cross-platform binaries with that one though). If you’re a VB 6 developer, you should definitely take a look at it, because it really is the next best thing to VB 6, if not even better and it looks to be very future-prove.

Then there’s also PowerBasic, which seems to be pretty fast, but not as user-friendly. I have not used this product, so I won’t go into detail here, but it seems to be mainly the compiler you get.

FreeBasic is a free, open-source alternative. You’ll only get the compiler, so building GUIs might be awkward. There are compilers available for Windows, DOS and Linux.

And last but not least, is PureBasic. This one owes its roots to the good ol’ Amiga. It’s available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux and AmigaOS. It is pretty inexpensive at $99, enabling you to compile for all four platforms I mentioned and receiving future upgrades for free. It’s also supposed to be very fast, because it directly translates your Basic code to Assembler instructions making it perfect for game development.

Do you know any other great Basic products? If so, please mention them in the comments. I would also like to hear from your experiences with VB 6 or its alternatives.

Share This