Thursday, November 17, 2011

Learn something new every day - Clear SSL state

I have known for years, as have most Windows OS users, that sometimes Internet Explorer caches data and refuses to let it go. This is especially frustrating when you're trying to test changes to a web site, and you keep getting the old version. Sometimes CTRL-F5 will force a reload, but sometimes you have to go into settings and manually clear your cache and cookies.

Well, I ran across something new this morning. We have an application that makes an SSL connection to a server. That connection was failing. We could ping the target server, run a trace route to it, all of that, so it wasn't a general network failure. However, whenever the application tried to connect, we were getting an error that said "SendSSLMessageBlocking error 12057".

A quick call to the vendor indicated that it was an SSL certificate issue of some sort. They had us uncheck “Check for server certificate revocation*” in the Advanced settings, yet that didn't fix the problem.

Well, Google to the rescue, as usual!!

I ran across this post on Google Groups about an issue with GMail Notifier throwing the same error.

Did you know that Internet Explorer/Windows also has an SSL certificate cache? And that it can get corrupted?

After a quick click of the "Clear SSL state" button on the Content tab and a restart of the service that was failing, everything is back up and running now.

It's a good day if you learn something new.

2 comments:

  1. Mental note - Write this down somewhere so I can find it at 3 AM when the cell phone rings.

    Thanks!

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  2. Thanks for this article. Do you know how to back it up before resetting it? Is there a certain registry key? Or is this something that can be scripted from a command prompt or VBScript or God Forbid I would have to use PowerShell but a powershell command?

    Thanks again.

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