problem using curl to access vendor's secure transfer site

[John Kittel]

Trying to set up secure transfer to pull from vendor's secure transfer site. Using Curl 7.15.2 on hp-ux 11.11.

My command is like this:

curl --trace mytrace.out -u myname:mypass https://xx.xx.xx.xx

(where I am supplying our actual username and password and xx.xx.xx.xx = their secure transfer site)

Getting this response:

curl: (51) SSL: certificate subject name 'secureftp.theirname.com' does not match target host name 'xx.xx.xx.xx'

(where xx.xx.xx.xx = their address, same one I supplied in my curl command).

Also, if I use dig to lookup their name, I get back the correct ip address. But if I lookup the ip address, I get no answer.

It seems to me this is saying their name information is not defined properly in internet nameservers, and they need to get that corrected.

But if I use internet explorer on my pc, I can connect.

So, am I doing something wrong or can work around it in my Curl command somehow?

[John Kittel]

ok, well, if I use --insecure switch in my curl command, I get a connection.

I'm not sure of the advisability of doing that in my production program. Comments on that?

- John

[Heironimus · Accepted solution]

You get that message because you're not telling curl to connect to their name. You're telling curl to connect to an IP, so it expects to see a certificate for the IP address. Assuming that the name on the certificate is right, you should be able to get rid of the message by connecting to https://secureftp.theirname.com instead of to the IP.

[John Kittel]

Ah, OK. Thanks. Now I get a connection when specifying the name, and don't need to use --insecure.

I was using ip addr because that was all they gave me. I only discovered the name when I successfully connected to the ip addr from my internet explorer.