or at least, I *thought* my SSL certificate wasn’t working in Safari.

When I launched our new company web site last month I thought I’d checked the SSL certificate was working in all browsers. It wasn’t, a customer quickly pointed out it didn’t work in for him and I tracked down a particular issue to do with chains. It seemed fine for google Chrome but Firefox couldn’t work it out. Anyway, fixed in half an hour, or so I thought.

Being extra vigilant, I fired up safari on my mac and cringed when I saw that although the url said https:// , safari wasn’t giving me a secure connection and I couldn’t view the certificate. Look, here’s a screen shot:

So, I spent an hour googling for people with similar problems, reading up on SSL certificates, studying the nginx config file thinking I probably had a typo (after all, it was working in both Chrome and Firefox) and then I stumbled upon a post (I can’t remember where, sorry, otherwise I’d link to it) that said safari looks just the same when on a secure connection as an insecure connection. I checked apple web site using https://www.apple.com and sure enough, no sign of things being secure. Except, there is…. look very closely in the top right corner of safari. If you click on the padlock you can view the certificate.

See, it was there all along, working fine. Ho hum, another hour lost to computing glitches.

Missing options in outlook web access? I was. I wanted to forward email from a service using Outlook Web Access but I didn’t have the option. It was simply missing. A friend had told me where to find it. I googled it and saw instructions on how to set it, but it wasn’t there. I could not see the ‘rules’ option. It was as if this account had restricted privileges.

Then I noticed, all the instructions on the internet had different colours and layouts. Was this service using a very old version of OWA? Probably… (It’s on an MOD server used for the Air Training Corps) but also… this is Microsoft Outlook Web Access and I’m using Chrome on Mac…. you wouldn’t think… surely not… Microsoft would write the web interface to only work on Internet Explorer…..

So, I fire up parallels and Windows 7 on my Mac, open Internet Explorer, log in and the world changes. All of a sudden I have every option I’ve been reading about. Suddenly the crippled web program becomes useful. Well, useful enough to set up forwarding – now I can action the emails through my gmail account 🙂