As much as I've become to appreciate Zope and Plone, one thing has bothered me (about my particular setup, it's nothing Zope or Plone specific) and that is: lack of encryption.

So while my SquirrelMail and Mailman installations have been secured with https from the start, and Cyrus and Exim both speak SSL and except for DNS no traffic on my machines was unencrypted, I still had the web admin interface and WebDAV access of Plone and Zope in plaintext. Ouch!

Today, while hanging out at the club, I realized, that I would either have to go home too soon or start to implement HTTPS for my Zope installation - doing any kind of unencrypted traffic at the CCC is simply not an option ;-)

So, with a little help from Cryx and Erdgeist I finally got my lazy ass up (not literally, of course) and secured my setup.

I am now posting this to tomster.org/blog via WebDAV and HTTPS, while slowly sliding off a a sofa at the club house. In case you are interested in the specific configuration or can help me with my ZMI problem, please read on.

Assuming, you've already got a https host running, add the following to your VirtualHost section. (installing a certificate and generally enabling https is not covered here. But here.)

This will give you WebDAV access via the URL https://hostname.tld/webdav/ (You will, of course, have to use a HTTPS enabled WebDAV client. Unfortunately, MacOS X's Finder supports only unencrypted WebDAV. Currently, the only alternative known to me is Goliath.)

ProxyPass /webdav/ http://localhost:1984/
ProxyPassReverse /webdav/ http://localhost:1984/

That's it!. Can't believe I've waited this long ;-) Unfortunately, one problem still remains: I can't access the ZMI (listening on port 8080 /manage/) via https.

Theoretically, I should be able to acces it via https://tomster.org/zmi/manage with the following ProxyPass directive:

ProxyPass /zmi/ http://localhost:8080/
ProxyPassReverse /zmi/ http://localhost:8080/

Anf while https://tomster.org/zmi/ yields the default start screen of Zope, https://tomster.org/zmi/manage/ seems to redirect to localhost?!? If anybody has got a solution to that, please let me know. Thanks!