Need some help. Test SSL site (It's easy!)


bob

Administrator
Staff member
UPDATE: Testing is done, it worked fine, and SSL has been installed here now too. Thanks to everyone who lent a hand.

I'm in the final stages of setting this website up as secure. There's really no need to do it, we don't have any personal info (address, credit cards, etc) for hackers to steal. However, sites are now being penalized for not having it.

I've converted one of my other websites first, as a test. If you have a moment, please visit http://www.gardenforums.com/
If you do, please answer the following questions.
1) Does your browser show the little padlock to indicate the site is secure?
2) Do you see any error messages or warnings? If you do, please copy the page URL and reply with it here.
Poke around on the site, see if it seems to work, see if you find any problems. If you're inspired to help further, register and log in. See if anything changes.

As soon as I'm satisfied it's working there without major issues, we'll move this site to SSL as well.
 
Last edited:
Bob,
1. Yes Padlock shows up as intended
2. No warning messages thus far.
I will continue look/browsing for ya. Nice site by the way.

Good news! Thank you for the kind words on the site. If you like gardening, by all means stick around and join the conversation.
Like plants in winter, the site's been pretty much dormant and I'm trying hard to get it back up and running.
 
Worked correctly as expected:
Capture.PNG
 
  • Like
Reactions: bob
Hi, Bob
1-Yes there is a padlock
2- No warning messages
3- Nice site, but, I'm not interested in gardening. I'll pass it on to the wife, though.
 
Bob
Padlock is showing for the Garden site. Funny, no padlock for this sight though. :rolleyes: 😟

There's nothing funny about that at all. This is by far my most active website, there's currently 20 members online and about 200 guests. The garden forum has far less than that. So... If one of the websites is going to break, or issue bright red "SECURITY RISK!" flags on your browser, I'd rather it be that one, instead of this one. That site routinely tests stuff before it gets rolled out here. Typically I can test it with few people, but this is a big change, from a technical standpoint, and I wanted to do more thorough testing.

SSL was installed there today. If everything runs smoothly and nobody comes back with a post about errors or problems, we'll do the same thing here real soon. As in within 24 hours, probably less. In fact, initial modifications are already underway.
 
Last edited:
Just be sure you have your DNS entry placed correctly....that's part of what our testing missed with our stuff yesterday.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: bob
Just be sure you have your DNS entry placed correctly....that's part of what our testing missed with our stuff yesterday.

Well, either that's already all done, or I'm heading for problems, not sure which... :)

All of the DNS info stuff was updated last week, when we migrated to the new server. The plan was to go SSL from the start, but I wanted to be sure things were up and running and also make sure the new server has the capacity to handle the increased load that SSL encryption puts on the server.

I did more DNS mods yesterday, when I enabled SPF and DKIM on the mail servers so that Gmail would stop rejecting our notifications.

That done, it was time to implement SSL. Once we were certain things were stable and operating as expected, we started the upgrade. I did a few small pages first, I have a couple of websites for friends and the like (Need a Ren Faire Musician? I know a guy...). The sites are tiny and get virtually no traffic, which makes them a great place to test out things when making a big change. That went smoothly so today we rolled things out to the medium stuff.

As far as I'm aware, there is no DNS record modification needed to go to SSL. If the place vanishes, we'll know I was wrong. :eek:
 
Just be sure you have your DNS entry placed correctly....that's part of what our testing missed with our stuff yesterday.

Oh, and in the "you get what you pay for" department. DNS changes done on Network Solutions routinely propagated in under 2 hours. I have the thomasbooksandtoys.com website DNS on GoDaddy. It took 3 days for that one to update, and I'm STILL not positive it's working 100% right.
 
the 'check' site shows a locked padlock, no errors came up ...
and a fyi, the thomas site also has a locked padlock with no errors on the screen ..
 
the 'check' site shows a locked padlock, no errors came up ...
and a fyi, the thomas site also has a locked padlock with no errors on the screen ..

Thank you for both of those. The Thomas site is acting fine on Explorer for me, and yet broken on Chrome. Seems to be a Chrome DNS caching error, haven't bothered to sort it out right now.
 
There's nothing funny about that at all. This is by far my most active website, there's currently 20 members online and about 200 guests. The garden forum has far less than that. So... If one of the websites is going to break, or issue bright red "SECURITY RISK!" flags on your browser, I'd rather it be that one, instead of this one. That site routinely tests stuff before it gets rolled out here. Typically I can test it with few people, but this is a big change, from a technical standpoint, and I wanted to do more thorough testing.

SSL was installed there today. If everything runs smoothly and nobody comes back with a post about errors or problems, we'll do the same thing here real soon. As in within 24 hours, probably less. In fact, initial modifications are already underway.

*I think you might have misunderstood me. The Garden sight has a padlock and a green indicator with Norton. The Modelrailroadforum says "not secure" and has a red exclamation point showing next to the web address window.
In case it matters, Google Chrome with Norton security via Comcast.
 
*I think you might have misunderstood me. The Garden sight has a padlock and a green indicator with Norton. The Modelrailroadforum says "not secure" and has a red exclamation point showing next to the web address window.
In case it matters, Google Chrome with Norton security via Comcast.

No, I understood you quite well. The gardening site was the first to get the behind the scenes items that create the virtual lock. I had just installed it when I asked for folks to test it. Now that I know it works, I've installed it everywhere. Take another look at the web address window. No more red arrow, correct?
 
Thanks for the help everyone! There were enough of you that tested it without any problems that I was comfortable moving ahead with implementing SSL here. Seems to be working well. If you see any "mixed content" errors, please post a link to the page you got them on in the thread I started for that.
 
so far it's good, had to log in again though [set to remember me] ..
no errors [so far] ps.. Windows 10, Firefox, Ad blocker ultimate
 
Last edited:
so far it's good, had to log in again though [set to remember me] ..
no errors [so far]

Yes, it forces everyone to log in again. It establishes a new secure connection this time. Most folks have the info memorized in their browser, so it's just a matter of clicking "log in". Should be like normal from here on out.
 
Hint for users: DNS flush.

Nope, no need. That was done last week when we migrated to the new server. The DNS remains the same. Everything is the same as before, except now it’s https.
The only thing you should have to do is log in again. Things will look exactly the same except for the nifty little padlock. Your bookmarks will still work, and once you set a new cookie by logging in, you’ll stay logged in. Very simple. Log in. Back to normal.
I suppose I could have done it all at once, but that makes trouble shooting difficult. So I prefer the one step at a time approach. Also, since it’s being done while the server is live, minimal down time is critical.
 
Oh, and the good news? Now that we’re on the new server and have https installed, I don’t plan any major upgrades for a while. There will be short outages when they release software updates, but hopefully that’s it for a while.
 



Back
Top