Can not access the website via SSL

Question

We have deployed our website to the live webserver, Windows Server, IIS 7.5. Website asp.net, .NET 4.5 I have configured the website bindings to allow https requests for this website.
Asked the hosting provider to open up the port 443.

I can access the website over internet with port 80, no issues at all. (http://mysite.com) But I can not access via https, (https://mysite.com). But I can access the site via SSL from the server itself, that means SSL configurations are fine.(https - localhost)

But I can telnet (telnet mysite.com 443), it responds to GET request via telnet. I have rechecked the certificate and changed it to a self-signed certificate, issue is still there.

These requests not being tracked in IIS logs as well, seems like the request is not reaching IIS. Hopefully something goes wrong before it reaches the server.

But, when I access the website as http://mysite.com:443, it works.

I m bit confused with this behaviour. Obviously the port 443 is open by the hosting company. But something is wrong with requests over HTTPS, which is supposed to send a request to port 443. Please help.

Answer 1

Because your site is working when you access http://mysite.com:443, I am almost sure that you created wrong binding on IIS. Instead of selecting https from combo box you selected default http.

There is a tutorial on how to do this on youtube: Changing IIS 7.5 Bindings by David Johnson

Answer 2

You've establish that the port is open and the hostname binding is there, otherwise http://mysite.com:443 would not work. Its the SSL part that's not working, hence you can connect directly by port and telnet (port 443 but not SSL) but not a browser via https. It's only a browser connecting to a https url that will expect SSL.. I'm pretty sure I've had the same issue, but cannot recall the exact cause but it was definitely related to an invalid SSL configuration or SSL binding.. The behaviour was like there is no connection, nothing, which is unusual, its the bad config causes the browser to abort the connection. If I remember what, I'll update or comment below.

Answer 3

So you can access the site using https://localhost? Your question is not quite clear on this point... what is the exact URL you are using? If it's https://localhost, that is actually an indication that your certificate is configured incorrectly. You seem to be interpreting this as an indicator that it's working OK and that is not the case. The domain name is tied to the certificate and SSL will work only when accessing the site using that domain name. So if it works for "localhost", something is wrong.

Answer 4

Finally I found the solution. Issue was a setting in the load balancer of the hosting provider. I have asked the question from them and they have figured out the issue. Anyways it was a good learning curve for me. And this knowledge is going to help others.

The firewall was already allowing both HTTP/HTTPS, which is why we could telnet through and run a GET / and still pull down content from the 404 page of the IP address.

It appears there was a certain profile applied to the HTTPS configuration in the load balancer which would only work for HTTP, so they have disabled that. When they set this up for HTTP and HTTPS they were not able to test HTTPS, because to do so would require an SSL certificate in IIS - which it appears we have already provided.

Thanks everyone for your help on this!