CNAME from external domain to CloudFlare DNS with HTTPS

Question

A site which has been developed for a client should live on domain test.clientdomain.com, obviously I'm not in control of this domain.

I'm hosting the website on test.mydomain.com using CloudFlare as DNS. On my server I have a self-signed SSL certificate and I use the SSL option Full SSL on CloudFlare.

Because the IP address of the production server might change I don't want to give the client the IP address of this server (so he could add an A-record in his DNS file). I want them to add a CNAME record pointing test.clientdomain.com to my test.mydomain.com. In this case if the IP address changes I can change it in my DNS file and the customer needn't worry. To make this work I also setup a vhost file that looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName test.clientdomain.com
    ServerAlias *.test.clientdomain.com

    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/test.mydomain.com

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    <Directory /var/www/html/test.mydomain.com>
                    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                    AllowOverride all
                    Order allow,deny
                    allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

This setup works fine for HTTP. When I want to add HTTPS I create a vhost record for port 443 as well:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    <VirtualHost *:443>
            ServerName test.clientdomain.com
            ServerAlias *.test.clientdomain.com

            DocumentRoot /var/www/html/test.mydomain.com

            ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
            CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

            SSLEngine on

            SSLCertificateFile      /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.crt
            SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.key

            <Directory /var/www/html/test.mydomain.com>
                    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                    AllowOverride all
                    Order allow,deny
            </Directory>
            BrowserMatch "MSIE [2-6]" \
                            nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
                            downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
            # MSIE 7 and newer should be able to use keepalive
            BrowserMatch "MSIE [17-9]" ssl-unclean-shutdown

    </VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

I turn on the CloudFlare proxy so all requests are proxied through CloudFlare but for some reason it gives me the following error:

SSL connection error

ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

I have a couple of other web applications running on this Apache, all with a vhost file for HTTP and HTTPS and they are working perfectly (so there's no problem with the self-signed certificate), the only difference is that in this case the request first goes to a completely separate domain (test.clientdomain.com) instead of directly to my own domain *.mydomain.com.

So to summarize, DNS file for test.clientdomain.com would have:

CNAME test.clientdomain.com -> test.mydomain.com

DNS file for test.mydomain.com would have:

CNAME test.mydomain.com -> production.mydomain.com
A production.mydomain.com -> 123.123.123.123 (IP address of my production server)

Do I need to configure something differently for this use case?

Are you saying Cloudflare lets you setup vhost file on their edge?! — wick

Emilio Perez Emilio Perez · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-08T11:50:36

As I can understand from your question, you are using the same certificate for the various web applications that are running in that Apache. So it must be a certificate for test.mydomain.com, production.mydomain.com or *.mydomain.com.

But, for this access, you need a certificate for test.clientdomain.com. Other way, the certificate's name won't match the name in the URL, so it wouldn't be possible to continue. I don't know CloudFlare proxy, so I can't tell if that error really makes sense with the disparity in the names or you have another added problem.

I should have asked for more information on this, but I don't have enough reputation for a comment. Hope this helps.

CNAME from external domain to CloudFlare DNS with HTTPS

2 Answers