Thursday, March 22, 2012

SSL certificate issues resolved

So after a bit of back-and-forth with Jumpline support (which was as supportive as hoped if not quite as responsive as hoped), I now have SSL certificates on my website (click here to see). This is cool, but the solution was not as obvious as hoped.
Apparently, the VDS manager (the software that manages my virtual domain) has some, well, quirks about how it expects things to behave. In particular, it requires that the certificate be actually named "server.crt" rather than whatever I defined in the httpd.conf file. Thanks to Andrew and Geoff at Jumpline, who went in and actually modified my server config to make this work, things seem to be working correctly now. It took 2 days of their futzing around to actually make it work, but it does seem to be working.
The other main problem is that I can't use multiple certificates as I'd hoped to do. I could do a wildcard certificate but that costs in the $400/yr price range - something I can't swing financially. So I wasted $12.99, which is sad but at least not an expensive object lesson. Still disappointing.
Now, though, I can begin to work again on OttoJotts for Facebook. I'll have to see how well it goes. I'm putting in a breakpoint, though - if I don't make progress for more than a day that I actually work on things, I'm going to punt and work on the web version instead.
Let's see what the next several days holds in store for OttoJotts...