Subject: Wildcard Certs

From: Mads Toftum <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 15:18:13 +0100

Wildcard certs have been discussed here on the list recently and
Thawte has been mentioned as the place to buy wildcard certs. 
We decided to check and got the following answer:

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We unfortunately discontinued the wild cards certs about 8 months ago                                                                          and no                                                                                                                                         longer issue them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            You would have to apply for each SSL individually.  
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So neither Thawte or Verisign (who own Thawte) issue wildcard certs.

vh

Mads Toftum
-- 
`Darn it, who spiked my coffee with water?!' - lwall

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 09:24:24 -0000

That's interesting! We still have a wildcard certificate (check it out at
https://wwws.rnib.org.uk/donation.htm) which we received back on the 16th
July. Thawte have been making it difficult to get them, since although they
save on administration and allow you limited NBVH to a single IP, they were
losing money by issuing them. We had to give a statement last year on how
many sites we'd run it on and agreed a price for them.

I will check with my contacts within Thawte and get a definitive response.

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

"I know it sounds cocky, but I honestly believe that one day there'll be a
telephone in every Town in America" - Alexander Graham Bell (my paraphrase)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mads Toftum [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: 16 January 2003 14:18
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Wildcard Certs
> 
> 
> We unfortunately discontinued the wild cards certs about 8 
> months ago                                                    
>                       and no                                  
>                                                               
>                                          longer issue them.   
>                                                               
>                                                               
>                                                               
>                                                               
>                  You would have to apply for each SSL individually.  

- 

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 09:43:03 -0000

There is information on the Thawte site to say that these are now issued by
Verisign. This page
http://www.verisign.com/resources/gd/buildEcommerce/certificates.html

Says:

£Name-Based Virtual Hosting: An ISP or Web Host provides each hosted
customer with a unique domain name, such as customername.isp.com.
If the same certificate is used for each domain name, browsers will indicate
that the site domain name does not match the common name in the certificate.
To solve this problem, a "wildcard" certificate of the form *.isp.com is
required to properly serve the multi-hostname configuration without creating
browser mismatch error messages. (VeriSign offers wildcard certificates on a
case-by-case basis, and they are subject to certain additional licensing
terms and conditions. For more information, please contact
[email-masked].)"

This is similar to the position that Thawte had regarding wildcard
certificates when we renewed last year. 

I'll post exact details when I get them.

- 

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 12:07:32 -0000

Here are the exact details as promised. 

Thawte stopped issuing wildcard certificates on August 28th 2002. They say
that Verisign have always done them and still do them (see my previous
post). I can give details of individuals within the company if anyone needs
to verify this for themselves. 

It looks highly likely that this will be the first year since 1998 that we
don't continue with wildcard certificates and go back to managing
certificates individually.

Thanks for raising this one Mads. Hopefully the position is now clear.

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