[cobalt-developers] ssl fix for httpd.conf in RIPE-land

[Frans ter Borg <frans@xxxxxxxxxx>]

hiya,

A client of ours recently pointed out that they had problems enabling SSL
for sites hosted on their server. Generating a self-signed certificate and
enabling ssl for a specific site on that server did indeed not work. Also
the mgmt interface became unavailable at http://server/admin but could
only be accessed via the http://server/.cobalt/sysManage pages.

It took a while to find out what was going on.

there is some dynamics in the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf in which it
parses itsself and verifies the existence of a file relating to ssl for a
certain site. If so, it will generate a VirtualHost section for that site.
These dynamics are between <PERL></PERL> tags.

The code will work for most people out there, but for this client it did
not. The code mentioned the following:

        s/80/443/go if (/^Rewrite/);

Sounds like a plan, but if you have an IP address which includes the
number 80, it will become mangled - ex. RIPE has recently started
allocating from 80.0.0.0/8 so addresses from that range will be changed
into 443.0.0.0/8 addresses (which obviously don't exist)

Changing the above line by

        s/\:80/\:443/go if (/^Rewrite/);

Will solve the problem, as only the port section of the address lines need
to be changed.

I suppose it would be good for SUN to patch this as more and more new
servers in Europe will be deployed in the 80.0.0.0/8 IP range and more
people will run into this issue. I'm too new to this forum to know how to
make this known to SUN's people though, so I hope they'll read it here...


Regards,

Frans

-- 
Quanza Engineering B.V.              Elandsstraat 44
Frans ter Borg                       1016 SG Amsterdam
E: frans@xxxxxxxxxx                  www.quanza.net