josswinn's questions

I am trying to set up a site which uses code cloned from http://usesthis.com/

My site is at http://hackingtheuniversity.net/

You'll see that each interview post on the site, uses the following URL syntax

http://firstname.lastname.hackingtheuniversity.net

The creator of the original site uses Nginx and has offered the following for how he achieves this syntax

https://gist.github.com/1840543

I've set up wildcard DNS and a ServerAlias of *.hackingtheuniversity.net, but I'm struggling to understand (and find examples) how to port the Nginx rules to modrewrite rules and would appreciate some help.

Thank you.

I ask this question, because Comodo are telling me that a wildcard certificate for *.example.com will also secure the root domain example.com. So with a single certificate, both my.example.com and example.com are secured without warning from a browser.

However, this is not the case with the certificate I've been provided. My sub-domains are secured fine and do not give an error, but the root domain throws up an error in the browser, saying the identify can't be verified.

When I compare this certificate to other similar scenarios, I see that in the scenarios that work without error, the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) lists both *.example.com and example.com, whereas the recent certificate from Comodo only lists *.example.com as the Common Name and NOT example.com as the Subject Alternative Name.

Can anyone confirm/clarify that the root domain should be listed in SAN details if it is also to be secured correctly?

When I read this: http://www.digicert.com/subject-alternative-name.htm It seems that the SAN must list both in order to work as I need it to. What's your experience?

Thanks very much.