@ Luke Maciak: Oh, I didn’t mean that you should bother to get it signed in this case. You know your own certificate already, so no reason to give free money to an incompetent certificate authority! :-)

@ Chris Wellons:

Hey, I just noticed your comment got eaten by the spam filter and was waiting to be rescued.

Well, the unique IP thing seems to be the only way to actually get the certificate in place on a Dreamhost shared server. At least as far as I could tell.

Sorry about the warning but I figured there was no real reason to pay for a certificate when the SSL setup is mostly for my use. If I was actually requiring people to log in to post comments I’d probably get a genuine one. But for what I’m using it, a self signed cert is good enough.

@ IceBrain:

Well, sharing is nice. Still, I wouldn’t trust a network I don’t know for “mission critical” stuff. For example, I don’t get people who use their neighbor’s open wifi connection as their primary source of the internet. I couldn’t live like that – it’s too unreliable and I would be concerned about all kinds of nasty worms the other computers on that network are likely infected with.

Oh, btw – if you have full access to your server you can configure your apache or IIS to force SSL access to certain directories. So for example anything in /phpbb/admin/ would have to use SSL.

I mainly did the wordpress hack because I’m on a shared server. Well that and I wanted it to automatically redirect to SSL based site when I click on links in my email.

I see you went for the unique IP option then? Us readers can somewhat manually use SSL as well, once we get past the big certificate warning message.

I was thinking about doing the same thing in my phpBB forum, but I don’t think it supports SSL, so I will have to write another patch *sigh*.

By the way, I share my Wifi network – it’s fine as long as you use a firmware that can be configured to use two different networks, one public and on private, and limits the bandwidth of the public one.
But now here in Portugal we can get an unmetered connection for 24€/month, so it doesn’t really matter. :)