SSL Site Returns Bad Gateway Error in IE, Works Fine In Other Browsers

Question

After installing an SSL certificate on a LAMP stack, the site doesn't seem to load for Internet Explorer, but has no issues in other browsers. I did include a redirect from an HTTP request to an HTTPS request in my Apache configuration that could be causing the problem:

<Directory />
   Options FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride None
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !443
   RewriteRule (.*) https://www.example.com [R]
</Directory>

I've double-checked IE's settings, including clearing the certificate slate, making sure SSL 2.0, 3.0 and TLS were enabled.I'm also not real sure if the above Apache configuration has anything to do with the error, but i can say that it's the only change I have made to Apache beyond adding the certificates to the web server. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You might have been looking in the wrong direction. I've experienced similar troubles until I've stumbled upon this part in the /etc/apache/sites-available/000-default-ssl virtualserver config: http://pastebin.com/wD5ccZTb

You'll need to add the last few uncommented lines OUTSIDE your directory specs, for your server/virtualserver config in apache.

They've written this workaround for braindead browsers like IE...

Answer 2

One of the other programmers made a change to the apache ssl.conf file that seems to have fixed the issue.

#   SSL Cipher Suite:
# List the ciphers that the client is permitted to negotiate.
# See the mod_ssl documentation for a complete list.
#SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT:!SSLv2:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW
#SSLCipherSuite -ALL:AES128-SHA
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:!LOW:!SSLv2:!EXPORT

The SSLCipherSuite -ALL:AES128-SHA line was commented out in favor of the SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:!LOW:!SSLv2:!EXPORT Line.

It seems like there was a particular cipher that IE wanted, but the Apache configuration was not set up to use.