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Tutorial: How to Set a Custom Web Server Name

Abstract

Follow this tutorial to change Access Server's web server identification string.

Overview

You can change the "Server" HTTP header that the Access Server's built-in web server uses to identify itself to clients (browsers).

One reason to modify this would be to implement an automated scan that attempts to identify the web server software being used and exploits it, which then becomes confused and unable to determine the software in use.

Making this change doesn’t affect security very much, other than security through obscurity, but some security scan programs can 'fail' on this, and therefore, we have made it possible to customize this identification string.

Prerequisites

  • An installed Access Server.

  • Console access and the ability to get root access.

Step 1: Set a custom web server name

  1. Sign in to the console and get root privileges.

  2. Switch to the scripts directory:

    cd /usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts/

  3. Set a custom web server name:

    ./sacli --key "cs.web_server_name" --value "HAL9000"1 ConfigPut
./sacli start

    1

    Change this to your desired web server identification string.

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