A story of having to take drastic action in order to figure out a fairly simple problem.

The issue:

I need to use the company’s VPN to access the servers. I can do literally nothing if I can’t connect to the VPN. One fine Monday morning, I open Cisco AnyConnect, click the button, enter credentials… After the posture assessment, it runs its Hostscan utility for a while and then just goes back to a “Ready to connect” state. I try a couple more times, including trying our secondary connection and nothing. No connection.

This Blog begins with a story about SSL certification with Amazon Lightsail and Bitnami. My first blog and my first WordPress site, I started up this thing with Lightsail since I already had an AWS account and the price seemed right. Installation was fairly easy and all went well until I got to the SSL certification.

Amazon’s wordpress installation on Lightsail uses Bitnami for a lot of the server settings. The server, when I SSH into it shows the private IP address of the server and not the public ip address. In trying to use the bitnami bncert tool to create an ssl cert, it’s saying that my domain name is not pointing to the statc IP of the machine. I’m hoping I just need to wait for the DNS to propogate everywhere, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

# (Stephen once you ssh in, run this code:)
$ sudo /opt/bitnami/bncert-tool