Alien Pastures switched to HTTPS

The “Alien Pastures” blog has been moved into a Virtual Machine (hence the short downtime yesterday) after its previous host hardware was replaced with a much beefier machine. This was a nice opportunity to configure the VM with a SSL certificate issued by LetsEncrypt (again, thanks Robby Workman).

So, from now on, the blog is served with a HTTPS URL by default. I hope you understand, this is a process seen on many other web sites too.

Cheers, Eric

10 thoughts on “Alien Pastures switched to HTTPS


  1. Hey Eric,

    been there, done that 😉

    Out of curiosity, are you using the official LetsEncrypt client with its huge annoying amount of python dependencies?

    For my servers I’ve switched to Dehydrated script (present in SBo), that is based on bash and curl and doesn’t require any special dependency….


  2. LoneStar , indeed Robby installed 30 LetsEncrypt dependencies in the VM… I had looked at dehydrated myself but never actually used that.
    Until now I had not dealt with LetsEncrypt, using CACert certificates instead.


    1. I only build them once and reuse them on all the machines… That said, yeah, I’d not be opposed to using dehydrated – it’s just that I have all of the kinks worked out of the official client and its usage, I think, so inertia wins…




  3. > So, from now on, the blog is served with a HTTPS URL by default

    This is not the case for me. I get HTTP by default and there is no redirect

    gzamudio@slack:~ $ curl -I http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2017 18:44:38 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.4.27
    X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.31
    Link: ; rel=”https://api.w.org/”
    Link: ; rel=shortlink
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8


  4. Gerardo, are you behind a proxy or filtering out JavaScript or what? You have an empty Link result. Here is what I get on Slackware 13.37 to 14.2:

    curl -I http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2017 18:56:35 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.4.27
    X-Powered-By: PHP/5.6.31
    Link: ; rel=”https://api.w.org/”
    Link: ; rel=shortlink
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8


  5. Your output looks the same as mine. Where do you see empty link result? No proxy or firewall here. If there was a redirect both of our results would be HTTP 301 (or whatever type of redirect is being used), not 200. It should look something like this

    gzamudio@slack:~ $ curl -I http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/
    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Location: https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/

    HTTPS does work but I have to manually change the protocol. It is not served by default.


  6. Not sure how to edit but I just realized what you mean. The Link: header does have your link, but it looks like your blog comment system strips it out. I see your-URL/wp-json and wp.me/kfu1. Either way, the HTTP status code is still 200. Tested from 3 different geographical locations.


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