Saturday 22 July 2017

How to: Linux / UNIX create soft link with ln command

Two types of links

There are two types of links
  • symbolic links: Refer to a symbolic path indicating the abstract location of another file
  • hard links : Refer to the specific location of physical data.

How do I create soft link / symbolic link?

Soft links are created with the ln command. For example, the following would create a soft link named link1 to a file named file1, both in the current directory
$ ln -s file1 link1
To verify new soft link run:
$ ls -l file1 link1
Sample outputs:
-rw-r--r--  1 veryv  wheel  0 Mar  7 22:01 file1
lrwxr-xr-x  1 veryv  wheel  5 Mar  7 22:01 link1 -> file1
From the above outputs it is clear that a symbolic link named ‘link1’ contains the name of the file named ‘file1’ to which it is linked. So the syntax is as follows to create a symbolic link in Unix or Linux, at the shell prompt:
$ ln -s {source-filename} {symbolic-filename}

For example create a softlink for /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php as /home/vivek/index.php, enter the following command:
$ ln -s /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php /home/vivek/index.php
$ ls -l

Sample outputs:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vivek  vivek    16 2007-09-25 22:53 index.php -> /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php
You can now edit the soft link named /home/vivek/index.php and /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php will get updated:
$ vi /home/vivek/index.php
Your actual file /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php remains on disk even if you deleted the soft link /home/vivek/index.php using the rm command:
$ rm /home/vivek/index.php ## <--- link gone ##
## But original/actual file remains as it is ##
$ ls -l /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php

How to stop a domain name pointing to your website IP address

 
You cannot have it refuse connections, since the hostname (or IP) that the user is trying to use as their HTTP host is not known to the server until the client actually sends an HTTP request. The TCP listener is always bound to the IP address.
Would an HTTP error response be acceptable instead?

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName catchall
    <Location />
        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/
    <Directory /var/www/>
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Friday 21 July 2017

How To Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

 Introduction

The Apache web server is the most popular way of serving web content on the internet. It accounts for more than half of all active websites on the internet and is extremely powerful and flexible.
Apache breaks its functionality and components into individual units that can be customized and configured independently. The basic unit that describes an individual site or domain is called a virtual host.
These designations allow the administrator to use one server to host multiple domains or sites off of a single interface or IP by using a matching mechanism. This is relevant to anyone looking to host more than one site off of a single VPS.
Each domain that is configured will direct the visitor to a specific directory holding that site's information, never indicating that the same server is also responsible for other sites. This scheme is expandable without any software limit as long as your server can handle the load.
In this guide, we will walk you through how to set up Apache virtual hosts on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS. During this process, you'll learn how to serve different content to different visitors depending on which domains they are requesting.

Prerequisites

Before you begin this tutorial, you should create a non-root user as described in steps 1-4 here.
You will also need to have Apache installed in order to work through these steps. If you haven't already done so, you can get Apache installed on your server through apt-get:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2
After these steps are complete, we can get started.
For the purposes of this guide, my configuration will make a virtual host for example.com and another for test.com. These will be referenced throughout the guide, but you should substitute your own domains or values while following along.
To learn how to set up your domain names with DigitalOcean, follow this link. If you do not have domains available to play with, you can use dummy values.
We will show how to edit your local hosts file later on to test the configuration if you are using dummy values. This will allow you to test your configuration from your home computer, even though your content won't be available through the domain name to other visitors.

Step One — Create the Directory Structure

The first step that we are going to take is to make a directory structure that will hold the site data that we will be serving to visitors.
Our document root (the top-level directory that Apache looks at to find content to serve) will be set to individual directories under the /var/www directory. We will create a directory here for both of the virtual hosts we plan on making.
Within each of these directories, we will create a public_html folder that will hold our actual files. This gives us some flexibility in our hosting.
For instance, for our sites, we're going to make our directories like this:
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/public_html
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/test.com/public_html
The portions in red represent the domain names that we are wanting to serve from our VPS.

Step Two — Grant Permissions

Now we have the directory structure for our files, but they are owned by our root user. If we want our regular user to be able to modify files in our web directories, we can change the ownership by doing this:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com/public_html
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/test.com/public_html
The $USER variable will take the value of the user you are currently logged in as when you press "ENTER". By doing this, our regular user now owns the public_html subdirectories where we will be storing our content.
We should also modify our permissions a little bit to ensure that read access is permitted to the general web directory and all of the files and folders it contains so that pages can be served correctly:
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www
Your web server should now have the permissions it needs to serve content, and your user should be able to create content within the necessary folders.

Step Three — Create Demo Pages for Each Virtual Host

We have our directory structure in place. Let's create some content to serve.
We're just going for a demonstration, so our pages will be very simple. We're just going to make an index.html page for each site.
Let's start with example.com. We can open up an index.html file in our editor by typing:
nano /var/www/example.com/public_html/index.html
In this file, create a simple HTML document that indicates the site it is connected to. My file looks like this:
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Welcome to Example.com!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success!  The example.com virtual host is working!</h1>
  </body>
</html>
Save and close the file when you are finished.
We can copy this file to use as the basis for our second site by typing:
cp /var/www/example.com/public_html/index.html /var/www/test.com/public_html/index.html
We can then open the file and modify the relevant pieces of information:
nano /var/www/test.com/public_html/index.html
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Welcome to Test.com!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success!  The test.com virtual host is working!</h1>
  </body>
</html>
Save and close this file as well. You now have the pages necessary to test the virtual host configuration.

Step Four — Create New Virtual Host Files

Virtual host files are the files that specify the actual configuration of our virtual hosts and dictate how the Apache web server will respond to various domain requests.
Apache comes with a default virtual host file called 000-default.conf that we can use as a jumping off point. We are going to copy it over to create a virtual host file for each of our domains.
We will start with one domain, configure it, copy it for our second domain, and then make the few further adjustments needed. The default Ubuntu configuration requires that each virtual host file end in .conf.

Create the First Virtual Host File

Start by copying the file for the first domain:
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf
Open the new file in your editor with root privileges:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf
The file will look something like this (I've removed the comments here to make the file more approachable):
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
As you can see, there's not much here. We will customize the items here for our first domain and add some additional directives. This virtual host section matches any requests that are made on port 80, the default HTTP port.
First, we need to change the ServerAdmin directive to an email that the site administrator can receive emails through.
ServerAdmin admin@example.com
After this, we need to add two directives. The first, called ServerName, establishes the base domain that should match for this virtual host definition. This will most likely be your domain. The second, called ServerAlias, defines further names that should match as if they were the base name. This is useful for matching hosts you defined, like www:
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
The only other thing we need to change for a basic virtual host file is the location of the document root for this domain. We already created the directory we need, so we just need to alter the DocumentRoot directive to reflect the directory we created:
DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/public_html
In total, our virtualhost file should look like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/public_html
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Save and close the file.

Copy First Virtual Host and Customize for Second Domain

Now that we have our first virtual host file established, we can create our second one by copying that file and adjusting it as needed.
Start by copying it:
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/test.com.conf
Open the new file with root privileges in your editor:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/test.com.conf
You now need to modify all of the pieces of information to reference your second domain. When you are finished, it may look something like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@test.com
    ServerName test.com
    ServerAlias www.test.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/test.com/public_html
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Save and close the file when you are finished.

Step Five — Enable the New Virtual Host Files

Now that we have created our virtual host files, we must enable them. Apache includes some tools that allow us to do this.
We can use the a2ensite tool to enable each of our sites like this:
sudo a2ensite example.com.conf
sudo a2ensite test.com.conf
When you are finished, you need to restart Apache to make these changes take effect:
sudo service apache2 restart
You will most likely receive a message saying something similar to:
 * Restarting web server apache2
 AH00558: apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message
This is a harmless message that does not affect our site.

Step Six — Set Up Local Hosts File (Optional)

If you haven't been using actual domain names that you own to test this procedure and have been using some example domains instead, you can at least test the functionality of this process by temporarily modifying the hosts file on your local computer.
This will intercept any requests for the domains that you configured and point them to your VPS server, just as the DNS system would do if you were using registered domains. This will only work from your computer though, and is simply useful for testing purposes.
Make sure you are operating on your local computer for these steps and not your VPS server. You will need to know the computer's administrative password or otherwise be a member of the administrative group.
If you are on a Mac or Linux computer, edit your local file with administrative privileges by typing:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
If you are on a Windows machine, you can find instructions on altering your hosts file here.
The details that you need to add are the public IP address of your VPS server followed by the domain you want to use to reach that VPS.
For the domains that I used in this guide, assuming that my VPS IP address is 111.111.111.111, I could add the following lines to the bottom of my hosts file:
127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.1.1   guest-desktop
111.111.111.111 example.com
111.111.111.111 test.com
This will direct any requests for example.com and test.com on our computer and send them to our server at 111.111.111.111. This is what we want if we are not actually the owners of these domains in order to test our virtual hosts.
Save and close the file.

Step Seven — Test your Results

Now that you have your virtual hosts configured, you can test your setup easily by going to the domains that you configured in your web browser:
http://example.com
You should see a page that looks like this:
Apache virt host example
Likewise, if you can visit your second page:
http://test.com
You will see the file you created for your second site:
Apache virt host test
If both of these sites work well, you've successfully configured two virtual hosts on the same server.
If you adjusted your home computer's hosts file, you may want to delete the lines you added now that you verified that your configuration works. This will prevent your hosts file from being filled with entries that are not actually necessary.
If you need to access this long term, consider purchasing a domain name for each site you need and setting it up to point to your VPS server.

Conclusion

If you followed along, you should now have a single server handling two separate domain names. You can expand this process by following the steps we outlined above to make additional virtual hosts.
There is no software limit on the number of domain names Apache can handle, so feel free to make as many as your server is capable of handling.

Refrence - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-14-04-lts
 

How to move, copy and delete a file or, folder on linux

Sometimes you don't remember linux command for these basic operations copy, move, delete a file and folder. There are three commands for each operation,

  1. cp: Copying Files. A basic example of the cp command to copy files (keep the original file and make a duplicate of it) .
  2. mv: Moving (and Renaming) Files. The mv command lets you move a file from one directory location to another.
  3. rm: Deleting Files.
the Linux command line offers far greater power and efficiency than the GUI. For instance, to instantly seek out and move all of the files above to a subdirectory called budget, your command line instruction would simply be:
Each of the Linux commands to move, copy, or delete files have options to make it more productive. Read on to find out more.

1. cp: Copying Files

A basic example of the cp command to copy files (keep the original file and make a duplicate of it) might look like:
In this example, we copy the joe_expenses file to the cashflow directory, which (because we haven’t specified anything else) is in our login directory.

Additional Options

Options are similar to those for the mv command:
-i  for interactive, asks you to confirm if an existing file (perhaps a version of joe_expenses already exists in the cashflow directory) should be over written in the copying process.
-r for recursive, to copy all the subdirectories and files in a given directory and preserve the tree structure.
-v for verbose, shows files being copied one by one. For example:
1
cp joe_expenses cath expenses cashflow

2. mv: Moving (and Renaming) Files

The mv command lets you move a file from one directory location to another. It also lets you rename a file (there is no separate rename command).
Let’s start with the basic format:
In this case, if JOE1_expenses does not exist, it will be created with the exact content of joe_expenses, and joe_expenses will disappear.
If JOE1_expenses already exists, its content will be replaced with that of joe_expenses (and joe_expenses will still disappear).

Additional Options

Options for mv include:
-i for interactive, asks you to confirm if an existing file should be over written.
-f for force, overrides all interactivity and executes the mv instruction without returning any prompts. (You must be sure your instruction is exactly what you want if you decide to apply the -f option.)
-v for verbose, to show the files being moved one by one

3. rm: Deleting Files

File deletion is done using the rm (remove) command.
This will delete the joe_expenses file forever (maybe Joe would like that!).

Additional Options

The rm command options include -i (interactive), -f (force), -v (verbose), and -r (recursive).
Like the commands above, it can also be applied to more than one file at a time.
This will remove both of these files.
Using the wildcard character: “*”
This will remove joe_expenses, cath_expenses, mike_expenses, and robin_expenses, forever.
Likewise, if you decide you want to remove everything you copied into the cashflow directory above and the directory itself, use:

 Use Caution with These Commands

For each of these commands, the use of the -i (interactive) option is highly recommended, at least in the beginning. This gives you a second chance to spot any unfortunate mistakes.
Similarly, use caution if you apply either -f (force) or -r (recursive), especially if you are also using a wildcard character like “*” to apply the command to several files at once.

Beware of the -r Option!

We’ll say it once and once only. Don’t do this:
This will delete every file and every directory you have.

what is sitemap.xml file

Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complements robot.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.
The sitemap.xml file allows a webmaster to inform search engines about all URLs on a website that are available for crawling. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. A Sitemap is an xml file that lists the URLs for a site.
Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites where:
  • some areas of the website are not available through the browsable interface
  • webmasters use rich Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash content that is not normally processed by search engines.
  • The site is very large and there is a chance for the web crawlers to overlook some of the new or recently updated content
  • When websites have a huge number of pages that are isolated or not well linked together, or
  • When a website has few external links
Example of a sitemap,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.pineapplelabs.in/</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-07-21</lastmod>
        <changefreq>1</changefreq>
        <priority>1.0</priority>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.pineapplelabs.in/about.php</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-07-21</lastmod>
        <changefreq>1</changefreq>
        <priority>0.9</priority>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.pineapplelabs.in/career.php</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-07-21</lastmod>
        <changefreq>1</changefreq>
        <priority>0.9</priority>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>http://pineapple-labs.blogspot.in/</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-07-21</lastmod>
        <changefreq>1</changefreq>
        <priority>0.9</priority>
    </url>
</urlset>

Thursday 20 July 2017

What is robot.txt file on a website?

Search engines generally crawl a website using a computer program known as bots. Like google search web sites using Googlebot. robot.txt file, restrict a boat to have access to all the folders which contains some confidential data or, unnecessary data.

Below ate the file format explained with example,

The same result can be accomplished with an empty or missing robots.txt file.
This example tells all robots to stay out of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
 
This example tells all robots that they can visit all files because the wildcard * stands for all robots and the Disallow directive has no value, meaning no pages are disallowed.

User-agent: *
Disallow:
 
This example tells all robots to stay away from one specific file:

User-agent: * Disallow: /directory/file.html
  



This example tells all robots not to enter three directories:
 
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /junk/

Note that all other files in the specified directory will be processed.
This example tells a specific robot to stay out of a website:

User-agent: BadBot # replace 'BadBot' with the actual user-agent of the bot
Disallow: /
 
This example tells two specific robots not to enter one specific directory:

User-agent: BadBot # replace 'BadBot' with the actual user-agent of the bot
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /private/
 
Example demonstrating how comments can be used:
 
# Comments appear after the "#" symbol at the start of a line, or after a directive
User-agent: * # match all bots
Disallow: / # keep them out
 
It is also possible to list multiple robots with their own rules. The actual robot string is defined by the crawler. A few sites, such as Google, support several user-agent strings that allow the operator to deny access to a subset of their services by using specific user-agent strings.
Example demonstrating multiple user-agents:

User-agent: googlebot        # all Google services
Disallow: /private/          # disallow this directory

User-agent: googlebot-news   # only the news service
Disallow: /                  # disallow everything

User-agent: *                # any robot
Disallow: /something/        # disallow this directory

Wednesday 19 July 2017

About Us

We are consultants, we do requirement analysis, we strive to find out innovative solution, check feasibility of solution, design, develop, test and deploy the IT solution to solve your problem. Our prime aim to focus on issues faced by a start up businesses and solve it using information technology.

As we know for any start up to grow at faster pace, its presence on internet is very important. It almost impossible to find out a customer who is sitting next to you without internet, at the same time internet connects you from local customers to global customers, makes your client base as broad as you want to make it.

We have expertise in user experience (UX Design), Graphics Design, Photoshop, HTML Website Templates Design, Website design, UI design as per SEO Compliance, Domain Name Registration, Control Panel Management, Website Hosting using Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Servers, Managing Cloud servers and traffic management, Mail Server Setup, Mail Client Configuration, Batch Mail Processing, SEO Optimization, Google Analytics Setup, Visitors Tracking, Paid Advertisements, Social Media Integration and Managment Like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Plus, Facebook Authentication, Google Authentication.

Sunday 16 July 2017

First impression is the last impression

Why is the Look and Feel of a Website Important?

Though there is some leeway within general industry categories, users can get confused or turned off by websites that look or feel too far outside of their expectations for a business or industry. Before you begin a website redesign, check your goals against industry standards by looking at your competitors’ websites. A fitness website should look fresh, powerful and well organized. A website for a band or fashion designer can be more creative with colors, texture and image choices.
The look and feel of a website can also be described as the website’s “personality.” Your website’s personality should match the attitude of your business and your business objectives while still fitting in with your client’s expectations of the business and industry you’re in.Your website’s overall look and feel is important because it instantly conveys an attitude to your clients before they even start reading the content on the site.


What is the “Look and Feel” of a Website?
 In its most basic terms, the “look and feel” of a website is how the site looks to the user and how it feels when he or she is interacting with it.
The “look” is defined by the following components of your website:
  • Color palette
  • Images
  • Layout
  • Font choices
  • Overall styling
The “feel” is determined by these characteristics:
  • The movement and response of dynamic components like dropdown menus, buttons, forms, and galleries
  • Sound effects
  • The speed by which pages and images load

How to Use “Look and Feel” to Enhance Your Web Design
Look and feel can be described using adjectives just like you would describe a friend or business associate. By using accurate adjectives, you can assist the team at your chosen web design company in their layout and design choices before they present their work to you.
Here are some examples of the types of adjectives you might use to describe your website:
  • Friendly
  • Approachable
  • Professional
  • Experienced
  • Upscale
  • Exclusive
  • Cutting edge
  • Stylish
  • High-tech
  • Powerful
On the other hand, websites with poorly considered overall design and usability schemes can inadvertently fall into less flattering categories, such as:
  • Boring
  • Uptight
  • Stodgy
  • Outdated
  • Tacky
  • Cluttered
  • Confusing
  • Childish
Instead of focusing on just positive adjectives, you can help your web design team triangulate your expectations by providing them with a description scale such as, “The website should look fun and exciting but not childish” or “Our website should be professional but never stodgy or old-fashioned.”
When working with a web design company, take some time to clearly define your business objectives and key adjectives regarding the look and feel of your website to ensure that everyone is on the same page before web design work begins.

How to redirect non-www URLs to www?

How to Properly Redirect Your Domain With or Without www ?

Proper redirects are important. Failure to use them will mean search engines such as Google will either see your site twice, or, they might not see it at all either of which can dramatically reduce your search engine ranking.

Redirects are what happens when you type in the address of one website and, before you know it, a different address for the site appears in your address bar. Every time you click a short link in Twitter or Facebook, you type www where it isn’t needed or don’t type www where it is needed, or just plain get transferred from one page to another you are using a redirect.
For SEO these are extremely important as Google may penalize you for posting the same content in multiple websites and, if not done properly, a www redirect will in fact look to Google as if you have 2 websites, one with www and one without.
Fear not though, if you use a Linux based web host (or any host using the Apache web server) the fix is easy.

Step 1:

Figure out if you want your website address to display with the www or without it.
Visitors will still be able to use both, but you want to settle on 1 for SEO purposes. From a technical point of view it does not matter which you choose only that you choose one. If you have printed material and/or many links using it one way or the other settle on that one.

Step 2:

Open up the .htaccess file in the root (top folder of your website where your index file lives) or create the file .htaccess if it doesn’t already exist.

Step 3:

If you want to display the www enter the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.your-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]              

 

If you do NOT want to display the www enter the following lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.your-domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://your-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]      

Note the backslash “” before the period(s) on the 2nd line of each block of code. This is very important and your redirect will not work without it.

How does this work? It makes use of an Apache module called mod_rewrite which is first invoked using the “RewriteEngine On” line. Next, it looks for a condition in which the domain name is specified as listed on the 2nd line. Finally, it sends the user to the new domain followed by whatever page they were trying to get (the $1 is anything after the slash following the domain name in the URL). It also makes it a permanent redirect with R=301 and tells the server it is the last rule to process in its chain with the L.

Step 4:

Save the file and test it by going to your website with and without the www making sure you see the desired behavior.

Step 5:

Test it externally with a site like pearanalytics which will tell you if it is not redirecting correctly.




What If htaccess file doesn't work? Enabling .htaccess file to rewrite path (not working)

 The best way is :

Edit or creat config file
 
/etc/apache2/conf-available/httpd.conf

Add
 
<Directory /var/www/> 
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks 
AllowOverride All 
Require all granted 
</Directory> 


Enable the config file

sudo a2enconf httpd

Restart or reload Apache
sudo service apache2 restart
or
sudo service apache2 reload

It's done!

Alternatively, 

New apache version has change in some way. If your apache version is 2.4 then you have to go to /etc/apache2/. There will be a file named apache2.conf. You have to edit that one(you should have root permission). Change directory text like this
 
<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>
 
Now restart apache.

service apache2 reload
 
Hope it works.

Thursday 6 July 2017

Digital Signatures and Certificates


What is a Digital Signature? 
A digital signature is an electronic form of a signature that can be used to authenticate the identity of the sender of a message or the signer of a document, and also ensure that the original content of the message or document that has been sent is unchanged. Digital signatures are easily transportable and cannot be imitated by someone else. The ability to ensure that the original signed message arrived means that the sender cannot easily disclaim it later.
What is a Digital Signature Certificate (DSC)? 
Digital Signature Certificates (DSC) is the electronic format of physical or paper certificate like a driving License, passport etc. Certificates serve as proof of identity of an individual for a certain purpose; for example, a Passport identifies someone as a citizen of that country; who can legally travel to any country. Likewise, a Digital Signature Certificate can be presented electronically to prove your identity, to access information or services on the Internet or to sign certain documents digitally.
Why do I need a Digital Signature Certificate? 
A Digital Signature Certificate authenticates your identity electronically. It also provides you with a high level of security for your online transactions by ensuring absolute privacy of the information exchanged using a Digital Signature Certificate. You can use certificates to encrypt information such that only the intended recipient can read it. You can digitally sign information to assure the recipient that it has not been changed in transit, and also verify your identity as the sender of the message.
Where can I purchase a Digital Signature Certificate? 
Legally valid Digital Signature Certificates are issued only through a Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA), Govt. of India,licensed Certifying Authorities (CA), such as eMudhra.
eMudhra, a Certifying Authority (CA) licensed by CCA, offers secure digital signatures through various options tailored to suit individual as well as organizational needs. 
Where can I use Digital Signature Certificates? 
You can use Digital Signature Certificates for the following:

  • For sending and receiving digitally signed and encrypted emails.
  • For carrying out secure web-based transactions, or to identify other participants of web-based transactions.
  • In eTendering, eProcurement, MCA [for Registrar of Companies efiling], Income Tax [for efiling income tax returns] Applications and also in many other applications.
  • For signing documents like MSWord, MSExcel and PDFs.
  • Plays a pivotal role in creating a paperless office.
How does a Digital Signature Certificate work? 
A Digital Signature Certificate explicitly associates the identity of an individual/device with a pair of electronic keys - public and private keys - and this association is endorsed by the CA. The certificate contains information about a user's identity (for example, their name, pincode, country, email address, the date the certificate was issued and the name of the Certifying Authority that issued it).
These keys complement each other in that one does not function in the absence of the other. They are used by browsers and servers to encrypt and decrypt information regarding the identity of the certificate user during information exchange processes. The private key is stored on the user's computer hard disk or on an external device such as a token. The user retains control of the private key; it can only be used with the issued password.
The public key is disseminated with the encrypted information. The authentication process fails if either one of these keys in not available or do not match. This means that the encrypted data cannot be decrypted and therefore, is inaccessible to unauthorized parties. 
Are Digital Signatures Certificate legally valid in India? 
Yes, subsequent to the enactment of Information Technology Act 2000 in India, Digital Signature Certificates are legally valid in India.
Digital Signature Certificates are issued by licensed Certifying Authorities under the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India as per the Information Technology Act.
What is the difference between a Digital Signature and a Digital Signature Certificate? 
A digital signature is an electronic method of signing an electronic document whereas a Digital Signature Certificate is a computer based record that

  • Identifies the Certifying Authority issuing it.
  • Has the name and other details that can identify the subscriber.
  • Contains the subscriber's public key.
  • Is digitally signed by the Certifying Authority issuing it.
  • Is valid for either one year or two years.
Digital Signature Usage
Can I use one Digital Signature Certificate for multiple e-mail addresses? 
No, you cannot. A digital signature certificate can have only one email address.
Can I use digital signature certificate in e-tendering systems? 
Digital signature certificates in e-tendering systems are allowed, but based on the service provider.
Can digital signature certificates be used in wireless networks? 
Yes, digital signature certificates can be employed in wireless networks.
Am I allowed to use one web server certificate (SSL) for more than one website? 
No. You will not be able to use one SSL certificate on different websites with different domain names because the certificate is explicitly associated with the exact host and domain name.
A wild card SSL certificate can be issued that can support different sub domains like abc.emudhra.com, def.emudhra.com etc. 
Regulatory
What is a Certifying Authority (CA)? 
A Certifying Authority is a trusted agency whose central responsibility is to issue, revoke, renew and provide directories for Digital Signature Certificates. According to Section 24 of the Information Technology Act 2000, "Certifying Authority" means a person who has been granted a license to issue Digital Signature Certificates. 
Who can be a Certifying Authority (CA)? 
The IT Act 2000 details the prerequisites of a CA. Accordingly, a prospective CA has to establish the required infrastructure, get it audited by the auditors appointed by the office of Controller of Certifying Authorities. Subsequent to complete compliance of all requirements, a license to operate as a Certifying Authority can be obtained. The license is issued by the Controller of Certifying Authorities, Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India. 
What is a Registration Authority (RA)? 
A RA (Registration Authority) is an agent of the Certifying Authority who collects the application forms and related documents for Digital Signature Certificates, verifies the information submitted and approves or rejects the application based on the results of the verification process. 
What is the role of CCA? 
The Controller of Certifying Authorities (CCA) is a Government of India undertaking that license and regulate the working of Certifying Authorities.
The CCA certifies the public keys of CAs, which enables users in the cyberspace to verify that a given certificate is issued by a licensed CA. For this purpose, CCA operates, the Root Certifying Authority of India (RCAI).
The CCA also maintains the National Repository of Digital Signature Certificate (NRDC), which contains all the certificates issued by all the CAs in the country. 
What is NRDC? 
In accordance with Section 20 of the IT Act, NRDC is a national repository maintained by the CCA that contains all Digital Signature Certificates and CRLs issued by all the licensed CAs. It also contains all the Digital Signature Certificates and CRLs issued by the CCA through its RCAI. All Relying Parties are allowed to verify the authenticity of a CA's public keys from this repository. 
What is RCAI? 
RCAI is the Root Certifying Authority of India. It was established by the CCA under Section 18(b) of the IT Act and is responsible for digitally signing the public keys of all the licensed CAs in the country.
The RCAI root certificate is the highest level of certification in the country. The RCAI root certificate is a self-signed certificate.
The key activities of the RCAI include:

  • Digitally signing licenses issued by CCA to CA
  • Digitally signing public keys corresponding to private keys of a CA
  • Ensuring availability of these signed certificates for verification by a Relying Party through the CCA or CA website
Repository
What is a CRL? 
The Certificate Revocation List (CRL) is a list of certificates that have been revoked by the CA, and are therefore no longer valid. 
What is a CPS? 
The Certificate Practice Statement (CPS) is a statement of the practices that a Certification Authority (CA) employs for issuing and managing certificates. A CPS may take the form of a declaration by the CA of the details of its system's trustworthiness and the practices that it employs both in its operations and in its support of issuance of a certificate. 
What is a CP? 
Certifying Authorities issue Digital Signature Certificates that are appropriate to specific purposes or applications. A Certificate Policy (CP) describes the different classes of certificates issued by the CA, the procedures governing their issuance and revocation and terms of usage of such certificates, besides information regarding the rules governing the different uses of these certificates.