Why a proxy?

Apache’s Tomcat is a complex beast whose primary role is to render JavaServer Pages. While it can be configured to use and serve the modern web it’s often an unnecessarily complex procedure. By using a dedicated reverse-proxy server such as nginx it allows you to separate web applications from the task of web serving.

In this entry, I will guide you through updating the standard terminal editor used by Ubuntu from its classic 2009 revision to its latest release.

In this guide I will walk through the process of hardening HTTPS connectors used by Apache Tomcat. As unfortunately the default configuration of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS using Tomcat 7 and OpenJDK 7 are vulnerable to a number of attacks and weak encryptions.

This entry will guide through the process of creating a self-signed certificate to use on an Apache Tomcat 7 or 8 HTTPS connector. Self-signed certificates allow secure, encrypted HTTPS connections but are not certified by any trusted certificate authority. So first time client connections will receive all kinds of warnings from their web browser. Because of this they are not recommended for use in production environments but are useful for secure LAN traffic or testing HTTPS configurations.

rsync is a widely used tool for synchronisation so to keep copies of a file on multiple computers the same. Because of its flexibility it has become the defacto standard on Linux and other similar systems. While newer protocols and tools such as Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync overlap with and improve on some of rsync’s capability. Rsync is still relevant today both for syncing and for other function such as local directory duplication and large file copying.