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Re: [greenstone-devel] Phrase and SSL

From Stuart A Yeates
DateWed, 29 Oct 2003 11:40:58 +1300
Subject Re: [greenstone-devel] Phrase and SSL
In-Reply-To (3F9EE3F7-4030008-cs-waikato-ac-nz)
John R. McPherson wrote:
> Doug Carter wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I've just implemented SSL on our Apache (Linux) webserver to serve
>> Greenstone (v2.38). Everything is working OK, with the exception of the
>> Phrase applet. On some browsers, the applet either doesn't work at all
>> or completely scrambles the output. I've tried to narrow it down to a
>> particular browser or OS version, but have yet to find any correlation.
>>
>> Has anyone else implemented SSL on their library? Have you seen any
>> problems with the Phrase applet?
>>
>> Any clues would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> The Phrase applet makes its own connections back to the webserver.
>
> I'm not a java expert, but in the source code
> (gsdl/src/java/org/nzdl/gsdl/Phind) it uses a java.net.URL class which
> I'm assuming isn't SSL-aware, so it is receiving encrypted pages back and
> not knowing that it's encrypted.
> (it uses URL.openStream() to get the data from the webserver).
>
> Maybe one of the java people can give a better explanation.

I'd guess I'd be "one of the java people."

Modern versions of java on modern web browrses should be SSL aware. The
problem appears to be that Phind assumes http rather than https. It
unfortunately it has code such as Phind::tidy_URL:

address = "http://" + document.getHost() + port + address;

I'm not sure how much of the server side code assumes http rather than
https.

stuart