We Are All Periodically Humbled by the Basics

Yesterday, I solved a problem that has been plaguing a colleague and I for three weeks.

The task was to install a server certificate, enabling HTTPS. Seems simple enough. I did it for the first time on one of my personal projects in 40 minutes over coffee one morning.

Not so simple at the office. Nothing we did worked. I had burned almost three weeks of full-time effort on this stupid thing. I blamed it on everything including the certificate issuer, the previous system administrators, our version of Apache, and our Information Assurance people — would they honestly be stupid enough to block port 443? Of course they wouldn’t.

But I would.

In my frustration-fueled haste, I had missed a stupid line from the output of iptables -L. Or rather, I hadn’t noticed this line was missing:

ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:<span style="color: #ff0000;">https</span>

I knew early on that something was off because we weren’t getting any evidence that a request for a resource was being logged by Apache, which is why I had blamed the Information Assurance people for about a day. A request via curl -O https://etc was working, as long as we specifically gave it a list of valid certificate authorities — because it wasn’t getting them via our Apache configuration, for some reason (hint!).

But that result only served to obfuscate the problem. It was working because it was a command executed on the same server. Nothing ever worked via the browser.

It’s all about the basics and I was wrecked and wracked with misgivings about my professional abilities. I couldn’t even revel in my victory last night. It felt hollow.

This morning is better and today will be better.