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I am a noob when it comes to System Administration or Networking and I thought I would get some valuable insight from the pros in here.

I work for a university and we host our website with a web hosting provider at say www.myuniversity.com. We were given a VPS running CentOS with CPanel. We recently acquired a wilcard certificate that was successfully installed on *.myuniversity.com.

Inside the campus we set up a few platforms such as Moodle and DSpace. We wanted people to reach these platforms by using moodle.myuniversity.com and dspace.myuniversity.com respectively. To do this, we created A records in the CPanel that point to the IP addresses to the servers of the platforms on our campus network. And this worked well.

A few days ago we decided to make access to these platforms default with SSL. So we had to enable SSL for moodle.myuniversity.com and dspace.myuniversity.com. With the help of our hosting provider, I had to first remove the A records and create the subdomains using CPanel. After this, hosting support installed the SSL on the subdomains.

After doing this, I re-created the A records and now, I can access the platforms without SSL but I can not with SSL, i.e when I try browsing https://moodle/dspace.myuniversity.ac.ug I get a "This site can’t be reached" error.

I wanted to know if I am going through the right steps here. If I am missing something or If I am doing something wrong. I appreciate any help I can get in pointing me into the right direction.

Thanks!

realnsleo
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2 Answers2

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I wanted to know if I am going through the right steps here. If I am missing something or If I am doing something wrong.

If the idea to create a sub-domain as dspace.myuniversity.com was to manage it separately then its okay. But if it was done only to host it over ssl, It was not needed you could have worked with A record in previous zone file only.

I get a "This site can’t be reached" error.

Well If this is the error then your server is not listening on port 443. See if it is by:

telnet dspace.myuniversity.com 443

OR

nmap -sS dspace.myuniversity.com -p 443

If you have nmap installed.

If it would have been an ssl error the site would have shown :

enter image description here

Anirudh Malhotra
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You need to install the SSL certificate and key on the servers that are running your services, that is, the computers your IP address points to.

The hosting service assumed that you are running those services under their hosting setup, which is not the case.

Tero Kilkanen
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