Daily Archives: April 10, 2014
SOS for SSL . . .
I was up at about 10am, just in time to see off Garland and Valencia Scott as they headed out in their new Phaeton. Hopefully we’ll catch up with them again soon.
It was kind of funny that while Garland was still out in front of our site hooking up his toad, a 5’er was already setting up in his 50 amp site. They go fast when it starts hitting 80 degrees like today. Then after a nice, quiet morning of coffee and Buc-ee’s Cranberry muffins, my day quickly crapped out.
I received an email alert that there was a problem with the credit card payment area on a client’s website. After placing their order, the customer is taken to the secure area to enter their credit card info. But in this case the customer was being told that it was not a secure area and then they were dumped out to an error page.
Not good.
A little checking showed there was a problem with the SSL(Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate associated with the site. The SSL Certificate is the protocol that provides the secure, encrypted data transfer between your computer and the online shopping cart system to allow you to safely enter your credit card data. It’s also what works with the ‘https’ in the website URL.
Since the Certificate is supplied by a 3rd party to my web host company, I put in a request to them to take a look at the problem. About 10 minutes I heard back from them saying there was no problem. Or at least no problem was showing up, no error codes being thrown, etc. So they contacted the SSL company, who didn’t get back to us right away. In fact it was a couple of hours before we heard from them. And again, they said there was no problem.
Well, wasn’t that helpful.
So everyone went to their opposite corners to work on things from their end. But after another couple of hours, still no solution, and my client’s website still wasn’t taking orders.
I knew that early on in this process they had re-installed the Certificate to no avail. But I was getting ready to ask them to try it again, when I thought to ask a question.
Did you delete the old Certificate first, or just re-install over it?
And the answer was that they just re-installed over it. So as a last ditch effort, I asked them to completely delete the old one, and then re-install.
And that did the trick. And 5 minutes later, all was right with the world, or at least that part of it. And about 10 minutes later, orders started coming in once again.
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For dinner tonight we fixed up our version of Taco Salad, with greens, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, beef chili, hot sauce, shredded cheese, and Chinese noodles And for dessert, we had some of Jan’s Strawberry 7-Up Cake. All very good.
For tomorrow, maybe a movie.
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Thought for the Day:
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” – H.L. Mencken
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