Verbosity 2.0 ~ Talking about life on Drupal

Once you have setup your website to use SSL you are probably starting to wonder what other things you can do with your SSL certificates.  In my case, I run a Dovecot server for indexing my mail and an Exim4 server for sending mail (only Exim is covered in this article, but the content may still be useful).  Both of these services use the same domain name as my web server so I decided to re-purpose my certificates for these other hosting services. 

Convert your Keys

In my last tutorial I helped you generate a certificate request and a key for your Apache2 server.  These files can be converted and used on your Exim server by first exporting these files to another format and then re-encoding them to suit Exim's needs.

First, export your certificate.

openssl x509 –in personal.crt –inform PEM –out personal.der –outform DER

Then, convert your certificate to PEM format for Exim.

openssl x509 –in personal.der –inform DER –out exim.crt –outform PEM

I work with a lot of individuals who run their own businesses and I am often surprised by the variety of email addresses from these clients and service providers. Nearly all of them have their own websites, but yet only some of them actually use their website address as their email provider as well.

Back in the early days of the Internet I think this practice was less common. If you had a domain, you used it. It is a good promotion strategy for your website if people can find your product information, right?

So what happened?

Today I'm nearing the end of a full week off. It's been great sleeping in, snowboarding and working on some projects I've been putting off for a long time.

As you probably already know I have a web server I own that I maintain as a hobby. Recently a few friends who have accounts on the server started requesting new features and I figured it was probably time to bit the bullet and start the upgrades.

For all of the domains hosted on this server they have one thing in common: they all use ecartis as their mailing list manager.

Why ecartis as opposed to mailman? It was a tough choice, but it basically came down to the configuration steps required on Debian. Mailman needed to be recompiled or something like that or I would have had to redesign a bunch of webpages to get it going. Ecartis just works once you know the system.