Subject: RE: Multople VH with same certificate?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 12:34:22 -0000

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Owen Boyle [mailto:[email-masked]]
>Sent: 11 February 2002 16:26
>To: [email-masked]
>Subject: Re: Multople VH with same certificate?
>
>
>Santosh Deshpande wrote:
>> 
>> hi all,
>>   I would like to know whether a SSL certificate is issued 
>to a specific
>> domain?
>
>Yes - a normal certificate has the fully-qualified domain name 
>in it. If
>you use the cert on another site, the browser will trap it and 
>pop up an
>alert that the cert doesn't match the FQDN.
>
>>   Can I run have two vhosts configured with a single certificate
>>   e.g. www.mydomain.com  ( 213.x.x.x:443)
>>   and  sub.mydomain.com  ( 213.x.x.y:443)
>
>SSL doesn't care about the IP addresses. If you run two sites like this
>with one cert, it will "work" - but the browser will throw up an alert
>which might frighten off customers.
>
>I've heard you can get a wildcard certificate which will match
>*.mydomain.com - from Thwate, I think.
>
Here at RNIB we've been using a wildcard certificate from Thawte
(www.thawte.com, pronounced "thought") since July 1999, mainly because of
the hassle of maintaining several certificates. <flame war commences>.
Recently, it simply been more economical to pay $500 for a wildcard
certificate than for several $100 certificates (the price may have changed
since our last renewal).

In all that time I've not received any complaints that someone couldn't
connect to our secure site. We've had 128bit security since 1997, again
without much difficulty. A while ago we had some problems internally with IE
and SSL. IIRC that was with IE5.0 and no service packs. We currently use
IE5.5SP2 corporately (yuk!) again without SSL related problems.

Of course, YMMV. In an event, you'll find Thawte staff very helpful.

- 
John Airey
Internet systems support officer, ITCSD, Royal National Institute for the
Blind,
Bakewell Road, Peterborough PE2 6XU,
Tel.: +44 (0) 1733 375299 Fax: +44 (0) 1733 370848 [email-masked] 

Agnostic (Greek) = Ignoramus (Latin)

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