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Security first with the Hiawatha web server
Small but Safe
Configure a Virtual Host
The following settings define a virtual host in the configuration file:
VirtualHost { Hostname = www.thisisagreatwebsite.com, \ *.thisisagreatwebsite.com WebsiteRoot = /var/www/thisisagreatwebsite StartFile = index.html ErrorHandler = 404:/index.html }
These settings tells Hiawatha to answer requests for http://www.thisisagreatwebsite.com
and also for htt
p://whatever.thisisagreatwebsite.com
, where whatever
can be any text at all (if these names exist in DNS).
Hiawatha will look for the HTML for this website in /var/www/thisisagreatwebsite/
, and the start file is index.html
. When you ask for a page that does not exist, webservers
give an 404 error; in this case, the missing page will be the start page: the ErrorHandler
setting takes care of that in this example configuration. This trick makes sure broken links will end up at the start page. Next, create a directory:
cd /var/www mkdir thisisagreatwebsite
and copy the default website page of Hiawatha, inserting the Greatwebsite
keyword:
cat /var/www/hiawatha/index.html | \ sed 's/Installation successful/Greatwebsite/' >\ /var/www/thisisagreatwebsite/index.html
Adjust the file rights so the web server can read those pages
find ./thisisagreatwebsite -exec chown www-data:www-data {} + find ./thisisagreatwebsite -type d -exec chmod 1774 {} +
You need to re-run the two find
commands if you add new files to the website files while being root: since you log in as root via SSH, you need to change file rights so the website can read them.
ls -all /var/www/thisisagreatwebsite
should now show the following:
drwxrwxr-T 2 www-data www-data 4096 Dec 30 17:34 . drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 Dec 30 17:34 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1768 Dec 30 17:34 index.html
Restart the web server to test:
service hiawatha check /etc/init.d/hiawatha restart
Configure DNS or Your hosts File
Now you can see if the website actually works. You have to make sure www.thisisagreatwebsite.com
resolves in DNS to the IP address of your web server.
For testing purposes, you can adjust your local hosts
configuration. In Windows, open file C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts
with administrator rights. Add a line like the following:
192.168.0.115 www.thisisagreatwebsite.com
In Linux, find the etc/hosts
file and add the new address. Next, you can restart your browser and point it to www.thisisagreatwebsite.com
. You should see your new website in your browser.
Troubleshooting
Things might not go so smoothly for your new website. The following command:
service hiawatha check
will report errors in your config file.
/etc/init.d/hiawatha restart
can also report errors; for instance, when loading certificates fails.
Have a look at the Hiawatha access logfile with:
tail -f /var/log/hiawatha/access.log
To view the error log, enter:
tail -f /var/log/hiawatha/error.log
Start your web browser and surf to www.thisisagreatwebsite.com .
If you can ping your website by IP address but not by its domain name:
ping www.thisisagreatwebsite.com
you know the problem is related to DNS and not Hiawatha itself.
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