SECURE ACCESS TO WEB APPS ON LINUX

This steps will show you how you can secure your web page on a embedded linux system using SSH. Installing a web server that support SSL on a system like the PhidgetSBC or RaspberryPi may take up large amounts of system resources, so: "Why not using the build in SSH server?"

What You Will Need

Anny linux based computer with an SSH server, a basic webserver (apache is an overkill, httpd of busybox will do)
A second computer or tabled with an SSH client.

Get to Work

Install elinks on the Linux with SSH and the webserver. Elinks is a text browser and does not support images, videos vb script flash etc.

sudo apt-get install elinks

Load a basic web page on the web server. See your webserver docs for howto. On httpd of busybox, just copy the page in /var/www/ or /var/www/cgi-bin/

If the page have dynamic content add the following meta tags in the HTML HEAD since elinks does not auto refresh and will always use the sessions cache to generate html displays.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30"><meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache"><meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1">

The above meta tags work well with elinks

NOTE: meta tags are applicable to the complete page and should not be closed.

Forward port 22 on your router to point to your linux box and also get your internet IP address from your router.

Testing

SSH into the linux box with the webserver

Run:

elinks

type in the adress of you web page http://127.0.0.1/html_file_name or

http://InternetIP/html_file_name

RESULT: SECURE ACCESS TO YOUR LOW END LINUX SERVER.

If you do not have a fixed IP for your webserver box, install a dynamic dns client. NO-IP works well with Debain Linux (PhidgetSBC or Raspberry PI)