SWB 1.7-11 and https

[Chris Barratt]

I installed this version back in November and have not had any problems with it. Today I tried to log into ITRC to download some patches and whenever I hit the login button, I get message "The connection was refused when attempting to contact forums1.itrc.hp.com".

After some playing around, I have found that I get this message whenever I try to go to a https site - which usually happens when I try to log in to things like Oracle's Metalink, ITRC, etc.

This error message looks like a bit of a catch-all error, but does anyone have any suggestions on where to start to look for the cause ?

Thanks,
Chris

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

Don't have that product but an old Mozillla.

In preferences : did you check if SSL is enabled ? Is the certificate of the forum still valid and how is your browser reacting to that (preferences again).

Fwiw

Wim

[John Gillings]

Chris,
Very odd! Please log a case to have it investigated.

[Chris Barratt]

Wim - yes SSL enabled. No certificates show, but I think that would generate a differnet error.

John - for reasons I'll outline below, I now think this is not related to SWB, and have emailed some of our network guys to see if there is anything they've done. If I'm not getting anywhere by next week, I'll open a case.

Further information
-------------------
The box that I use SWB from has an IP number in the 203... range. Our main cluster has a local 10... IP number.

I tried to use Curl from 203 box to access https://metalink.oracle.com/ and it gives back a "can't connect" error message.
When I do the same thing from a cluster node, I get an error message about certificates - which tends to indicate to me that I am able to connect but have not specified the Curl command correctly.

Also, if I access a URL served by our cluster from the 203 box, using https then I am able to get at it.

Hence, I feel it is probably not an SWB error, but perhaps there is some sort of blocking of https from 203 IP numbers or something.

Now the hard part is finding someone who knows what is going on with our network ! :-)

Cheers,
Chris

[Steven Schweda]

> I tried to use Curl from 203 box [...]

Hmmm. I almost suggested using Wget to see
if the problem was confined to the browser,
or if it might be a more general network
problem, but I thought that that would be
excessively complicated. "connection
refused" is UNIX-speak for "no one is
listening on that port", but it wasn't clear
that that was really the message behind the
message.

When in doubt, blame the network guys, I
always say. Seems to be the right answer
here.

Another (even more extreme) diagnostic tool
would be to install Apache (CSWS) everywhere,
so that there's always a working HTTPS server
within easy reach.