Posts Tagged ‘godaddy’

Don’t revoke GoDaddy SSL certificate. (Expired) Revoked SSL is impossible to revert

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

godaddy_logo
One of our company SSL (https) Certificates recently expired so I needed to renew the SSL certificate.

I was in a hurry doing plenty of other stuffs so it seemed logical for me to Revoke the Certificate. I thought revoking the certificate will simply cancel it and afterwards, in Godaddy's SSL (Manager Certificates) interface the Revoked – Cancelled certificate will re-appear in the menu, ready to be generated in the same way as earlier I initially generated the Godaddy's bought SSL certificate

Hence I proceeded and used Revoke button:

Godaddy SSL certificate manager browser certificate Screenshot

Well guess what my calculations, were wrong.
 Revoking, just cancel it. The  revoked domain SSL certificate did not show up again in Godaddy's Cert Manager and I have no way from their interface to revert the changes.

To deal with the situation, I contacted Godaddy Support immediately with the following inquiry:
 

Other : Revoked SSL Certificate
Issue :
Hello we have revoked the SSL certificate for our domain our.domain-name.com.
 Can we revert back the certificate as it was.
If not how to generate a new key for our domain https://our.domain-name.com
Thanks in Advance.
Kindest Regards

"My-Company-name" Tech Support

In 5 hours time I received the following tech support answer:
 

Dear Tech Support,

Thank you for contacting Online Support. It is not possible to reinstate a canceled certificate. You will need to purchase a new certificate. I have requested that a refund be applied to your account. Once the credit appears in your account, please allow 5-7 business days to see the funds applied to the associated payment method. Thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter.

Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.

Sincerely,

Christian P.
Online Support Team
Customer Inquiry
Name : Cadia Tech Support
Domain Name : our.domain-name.com
ShopperID : xxxxxxxxx
Phone : xxxxxxxx
Shopper Validated : Yes
Browser : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3

Apparently Godaddy, can work out a bit on their tech support answering time 5 hours for a simple reply is quite long.

Now taking in consideration, above reply from Godady, my only options are to either wait for 5 to 7 (business days) or buy a new credit for SSL certificate.

Buying a new credit will probably not happen as our company is experiencing some financial troubles because of the crisis. So I guess we will have to wait for this 7 days at worst. So again if you wonder to REVOKE or not an SSL certificate. Think again …

Just a small note to make here, that Godaddy has a very straight forward way to just renew an expered certificate, which I succesfully later have done for 4 domains. Well, if only I knew earlier what REVOKE SSL cert really does I wouldn't have ended in this mess …

My E-Marketing Report Final Godaddy.com Versus Enom.com for Download (Godaddy.com compared to Enom.com)

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Some few months ago, I’ve posted some study materials for e-marketing & commerce course (discipline) that I followed in Arnhem Business School (ABS)
Apart from that I had a final assignment which was supposed to be handed in some few weeks before the begging of the Christmas break.

The Emarketing assignment’s aim was to make a comparison of two websites which are operating in the same or very similar business field

The report’s goal was to present to the E-marketing teacher which in my case was Peter Stemers that the student has been acquainted with the basic theories of Emarketing.
The project was actually rather easy and the main issue to build up a project like this is the start up to complete it you just need to put a start and persist in expanding the document.

As the topic was very interesting to myself I started quite early in preparing my assignment (just a few weeks after it was assigned).

I’ve considered my profound interest into Information and Computer Technology (ICT) and decided to create a report which evaluates two websites which are into the IT sphere.
After a examination over a few possible domain names like for example:
Verizon – verizon.com and AT&T – att.com
1& 1and1.co.uk and Godaddy etc.

I’ve finally set my websites to compare choice on: Godaddy.com and enom.com

The criterias for selection of Godaddy and Enom as a target companies to compare their online business was as follows::

1. Both Godaddy and Enom are into the same business online industry, ( e.g. domain selling, reselling, blog hosting, webhosting, SSL certificates, online presence Search Engine optimization etc.)
Some other selection factor that convinced me to choose exactly Enom.com and Godaddy were that this are the biggest companies in the domain names selling IT sector and even better the Domain Selling industry has a tight relation to the History of how the Internet emerged.

The report became really thoroughful, the Godaddy vs Enom emarketing report has the size of 59 pages. Officially the study criterias has been that normally the usual student emarketing reports contains about 15 to 20 pages, however as the business products and services that this huge internet domain reseller companies has, I was forced to exceed the set teacher limitation of 20 pages and do it in 59 pages.

I’ve handed in my emarketing report and Peter Stemers graded it with 8.5 points from 10 possible (which by the way is quite a high mark for Arnhem Business School)

By the wat the E-marketing course was quite a silly one though for people that are not have an avarage computer knowledge and interest into Internet Commerce it was okay.

To read the table of contents of the Report comparison Enom compared to Godaddy click over here
Here is also my Emarketing Final Report Godaddy.com vs Enom.com (Godaddy.com compared to Enom.com) in both PDF and DOC, I hope this reports will be helpful to some marketing researchers out there to get an estimate on how the two companies are performing in the domain selling and reselling business:

1. Download My Emarketing and E-commerce report Godaddy Versus Enom.com (Godaddy Compared to Enom.com) doc version

2. Download E-marketing report Godaddy.Com VS Enom.Com (Godaddy.com Compared to Enom.com) in PDF

Compiling this Emarketing report costed me a lot of effort and time, the overall completion of the report has took me about a two weeks time, whether each day I worked a couple of hours on it.
I express also my big thanks to Alex Petrov (a friend of mine) for helping me read and review the report and fix some minor errors in sentence structures and my language of expression.

The Godaddy VS Enom Emarketing report outlines, numerous pitfalls that both Enom Company and Go Daddy has done in terms of SEO, Emarketing, user friendliness and usability

I believe this report could be really helpful for the these two competitive companies and could help them improve both their user image, their accessibility and Search Engine indexing.
On the other hand the report could be a good example for (HAN – Arnhem Business School E-Marketing) students on how to write a good looking Emarketing report to give themselves a pass.

An interesting fact is that before I decide to publish the report online and make it available to everyone I tried a known selling marketing report, I tried to offer to both Godaddy.Com and Enom.Com to sell them this report by sending the offer to their marketing and sales guys.
Enom.com has returned me an email, that they will look forward to my request, whether with Godaddy I have received an email by Go Daddy founder and CEO Bob Parons and the COO Warren Adelman

I will present you here the reply just to show you how impodent this mans are! My offer to sell them this great report for the symbolic sum of 200 EUR which will help their companies grow was considered I quote: “Unsolicated Report”.
Below I present you my offer email plus the impudent reply email by GoDaddy’s CEO and CEO:


SNAP – My Email to Godaddy
Hi Bob,

My name is Georgi Georgiev and I’m currently completing my bachelor in
Business Administration in HAN University of Applied Sciences (The
Netherlands).

Currently I’m developing an E-marketing report which is comparing the 2
largest internet domian registrars
godaddy.com and enom.com.

The report is a in depth SEO and E-marketing analysis of current
positioning in major search engines of Godaddy.com and Enom.com as well
as an overall analysis of user user friendliness, screen resolution
readiness of the two websites.
In the report I also analyse the behaviour of the enom.com and
godaddy.com as tested with different major Internet web browsers,
general user experience. External statistical websites etc. etc.

This research document does also concludes what are the strengths &
weaknesses of both your company and enom.com. The aim of the report is
to show, what Godaddy advantages and pitfalls if compared to Enom.com.

It also includes a number of suggestion for improvements which will be
beneficial for your company to drive more internet traffic to you as
well as increase your number of customers.

The report is 60 pages long document and includes many things that might
be beneficial for your business.

If you’re interested into the report and you’d like to buy it for me for
a very cheap price of 200 EUR, please contact me on my mail
hipo@www.pc-freak.net or systemexec@gmail.com.

Best Regards,
Georgi


Georgi Georgiev

——
END of SNAP

SNAP – Godaddy’s Bob Parson and Warren Adelman Reply Email:

Office of the President Response
Dear Georgi Georgiev,

Thank you for contacting the Office of the President. Our CEO, Bob Parsons, and President and COO, Warren Adelman, have asked me to respond on their behalf.

We value your time and appreciate the information you have provided regarding this request. Please understand that we are not seeking to acquire any unsolicited reports of this nature at this time.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

Jordan McAlister

Hope this post is helpful to some students stucked with writting their E-marketing report
I also hope it shows how proficient, I’m in building reports and might be a good exapmle on how qualitative my work is and enhearten somebody to hire me as an E-marketing consultant 😉

How to fix “Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons” SSL certificate lighttpd troubles

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Firefox SSL Pro could not verify for uknown reasons solve error

I’ve been issuing new wildcard multiple SSL certificate to renew an expiring ones. After I completed the new certificate setup manually on the server (a CentOS 5.5 Final running SoluSVM Pro – Virtual Private Manager), I launched Firefox to give a try if the certificate is properly configured.

Instead of my expectations that the browser would just accept the certificate without spitting any error messages and all will be fine, insetad I got error with the just installed certificate and thus the browser failed to report the SSL cert is properly authenticated.

The company used to issue the SSL certificate is GlobeSSL – http://globessl.com , it was quite “hassle”, with the tech support as the first certficate generated by globessl was generation based on SSL key file with 4096 key encryption.

As the first issued Authenticated certificate generated by GlobeSSL was not good further on about a week time was necessery to completethe required certificate reissuing ….

It wasn’t just GlobeSSL’s failure, as there were some spam filters on my side that was preventing some of GlobeSSL emails to enter normally, however what was partially their fault as they haven’t made their notification and confirmation emails to pass by a mid-level strong anti-spam filter…

Anyways my overall experience with GlobeSSL certificate reissue and especially their technical support is terrible.
To make a parallel, issuing certificates with GoDaddy is a way more easier and straight forward.

Now let me come back to the main certificate error I got in Firefox …

A bit of further investigation with the cert failure, has led me to the error message which tracked back to the newly installed SSL certificate issues.
In order to find the exact cause of the SSL certificate failure in Firefox I followed to the menus:

Tools -> Page Info -> Security -> View Certificate

Doing so in the General browser tab, there was the following error:

Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons

The information on Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons on the internet was very mixed and many people online suggested many possible causes of the issue, so I was about to loose myself.

Everything with the certificate seemed to be configured just fine in lighttpd, all the GlobeSSL issued .cer and .key file as well as the ca bundle were configured to be read used in lighttpd in it’s configuration file:
/etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Here is a section taken from lighttpd.conf file which did the SSL certificate cert and key file configuration:

$SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" {
ssl.engine = "enable"
ssl.pemfile = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle"
}

The file /etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle was containing the content of both the .key (generated on my server with openssl) and the .cer file (issued by GlobeSSL) as well as the CA bundle (by GlobeSSL).

Even though all seemed to be configured well the SSL error Could not verify this certificate for unknown reasons was still present in the browser.

GlobeSSL tech support suggested that I try their Web key matcher interfacehttps://confirm.globessl.com/key-matcher.html to verify that everything is fine with my certificate and the cert key. Thanks to this interface I figured out all seemed to be fine with the issued certificate itself and something else should be causing the SSL oddities.
I was further referred by GlobeSSL tech support for another web interface to debug errors with newly installed SSL certificates.
These interface is called Verify and Validate Installed SSL Certificate and is found here

Even though this SSL domain installation error report and debug tool did some helpful suggestions, it wasn’t it that helped me solve the issues.

What helped was First the suggestion made by one of the many tech support guy in GlobeSSL who suggested something is wrong with the CA Bundle and on a first place the documentation on SolusVM’s wiki – http://wiki.solusvm.com/index.php/Installing_an_SSL_Certificate .
Cccording to SolusVM’s documentation lighttpd.conf‘s file had to have one extra line pointing to a seperate file containing the issued CA bundle (which is a combined version of the issued SSL authority company SSL key and certificate).
The line I was missing in lighttpd.conf (described in dox), looked like so:

ssl.ca-file = “/usr/local/solusvm/ssl/gd_bundle.crt”

Thus to include the directive I changed my previous lighttpd.conf to look like so:

$SERVER["socket"] == "0.0.0.0:443" {
ssl.engine = "enable"
ssl.pemfile = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/wildcard.mydomain.bundle"
ssl.ca-file = "/etc/lighttpd/ssl/server.bundle.crt"
}

Where server.bundle.crt contains an exact paste from the certificate (CA Bundle) mailed by GlobeSSL.

There was a couple of other ports on which an SSL was configured so I had to include these configuration directive everywhere in my conf I had anything related to SSL.

Finally to make the new settings take place I did a lighttpd server restart.

[root@centos ssl]# /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
Stopping lighttpd: [ OK ]
Starting lighttpd: [ OK ]

After lighttpd reinitiated the error was gone! Cheers ! 😉