I wanted to get some Nagios checks running from my home Nagios box to my new VPS, and I wanted to do it via SSH (at the time I didn’t know about NSClient++ with certificates).  Fortunately, this is (reasonably!) easy to do.

Well, cutting off from the old VPS provider and onto a new one was remarkably painless.  The new provider is Iniz, I picked up a plan for GBP 4.50 a month, that includes 2Gb of RAM, 4 vCPU, 2Gb RAM, 1Gb swap, 100Gb disk, 1Gb/s (max) pipe, and 1Tb of monthly bandwidth.

Turns out my VPS provider has had a major outage, which bodes pretty badly considering it’s my first month with them.  Service has been out for 24 hours now, with no real updates or any end in site.  This comes off the back of a week’s worth of random small outages and severe packet loss.

Nginx is a multi-purpose web server / reverse proxy which is commonly used to front busy websites.  It can also be used in reverse proxy mode to help secure websites from unexpected vulnerabilities.  It also allows you to do some pretty cool stuff with redirection and can serve up content all on its own.  In this example, we’ll just be using nginx to protect specific content.

In my previous post I outlined how you can create your own self-signed CA.  With that CA in hand, you should be able to deploy your CA public certificate in any place you want certificates signed by it to be trusted, and then create your own SSL certificates.

If you want to make your own CA, usually for the purposes of signing certificates internally for testing and such, you can do that pretty easily with CentOS.  On a secure box somewhere, you’ll need to create a CA certificate.