IPad – Safari complains about SSL certificate on redirect page

ipadsafarisslwindows

I have gotten reports from people navigating to our site without entering the www. part of the URL that our SSL certificate does not match and so generates a warning. This is technically correct I suppose since our SSL certificate is for the www. domain and two other subdomains.

But I have a redirect function so that anyone who enters the non-www url gets instantly redirected to the www URL. I have tested this on several browsers and on android phones. It seems only on Safari have any problems been found. Anyone have any suggestions on why this is happening with Safari and how to avoid it? The server is a windows server running IIS.

Best Answer

There is nothing you can do except get a new certificate which covers both www and non-www.

Any redirects will only be done after a successful SSL handshake. But since your certificate does not match the name in the URL used by the client there will be no successful SSL handshake and thus no redirect.

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Safari not accepting website certificate

I've since solved the problem, though I'm not sure if this is the right answer for everyone.

The problem seemed to come from the certificate automatically generated from apple (com.apple.idms.appleid.prd.[large character string]). A quick Google search didn't tell me what this certificate was for, but I'm sure that deleting it was probably not the best solution. Ignoring that thought, I deleted it anyway and now I can log in without a problem. I'm sure that something bad will happen with other things on my computer (private key, other certificates, something), but it hasn't happened yet so I'm calling it a win.

UPDATE:

A couple of months on, I still haven't had anything bad happen so I guess this solution didn't break anything else.

UPDATE 2:

About a year on, this problem still comes up from time to time (even with 10.10). I keep deleting the certificate in the keychain and it keeps working for a while.

MacOS – Mavericks Server: Unable to use 3rd party SSL Certificates with Open Directory

I believe Apple fixed that bug in Server 4 but I can't reproduce it on Server 5. Have you checked the serveradmin command line tool to check your settings and status:

sudo serveradmin fullstatus dirserv
sudo serveradmin settings dirserv
sudo serveradmin -x settings certs

The -x argument instructs serveradmin to format the data as XML, which often shows more information (at least in the case of certs).

Sometimes you can set things there that the GUI balks at - but you also want to have the ability to call AppleCare for support or a great backup plan that's tested before mucking with sudo and serveradmin from my experience.

Best Answer

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Safari not accepting website certificate

MacOS – Mavericks Server: Unable to use 3rd party SSL Certificates with Open Directory

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