Web and mail server -- host names and certificates
by Gerard Lally from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6N84Q)
I am planning to set up a VPS Slackware server to provide web and mail services for at least a couple of domains. I'm not a total novice : I had a web and mail server running on NetBSD about fifteen years ago.
This is a personal project, not for business, and I have a throwaway domain to get everything working first.
This time I would like to secure all communications with something like Let's Encrypt (are there better alternatives these days?).
I plan to use a reverse proxy for the web server, and Postfix/Cyrus IMAP for mail, CardDAV and CalDAV.
What is standard policy for naming servers in these situations? www.example.com would be fine for the web server but not the mail server. imap.example.com would be fine for incoming mail but not for smtp.example.com. From my preliminary research it seems that an SSL certificate is attached to one host name only.
I could isolate each service in a container or virtual machine but I would like to reduce the complexity if possible, given that running web and mail servers is already complicated enough.
This is a personal project, not for business, and I have a throwaway domain to get everything working first.
This time I would like to secure all communications with something like Let's Encrypt (are there better alternatives these days?).
I plan to use a reverse proxy for the web server, and Postfix/Cyrus IMAP for mail, CardDAV and CalDAV.
What is standard policy for naming servers in these situations? www.example.com would be fine for the web server but not the mail server. imap.example.com would be fine for incoming mail but not for smtp.example.com. From my preliminary research it seems that an SSL certificate is attached to one host name only.
I could isolate each service in a container or virtual machine but I would like to reduce the complexity if possible, given that running web and mail servers is already complicated enough.