Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Issues with site-wide SSL configuration

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
Wow, this is a methusalem! ACS was released 2001, OpenACS 4.5 was in 2002, this is quite a while.

You might consider the following options:
1) experiment with the various nsopenssl updates [1,2] or try to contact scott goodwin
2) upgrade from AOLserver to NaviServer, and use current OpenACS sources as a running documentation, what changes are needed (when i added the first NaviServer support to OpenACS more than 10 years ago, i remember, it was not much work)
3) use a reverse proxy such as nginx [2] for ssl/tls offloading

If you not want to invest effort in this application, (3) is probably the easiest step.

[1] https://panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/Nsopenssl
[2] https://github.com/ahelsley/nsopenssl
[3] https://www.nginx.com/

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Posted by Jose Mendez on
Gustaf, Thanks for your reply. Indeed, this is quite an old installation. I believe it was instantiated in 2001.

Option (1) is where we are today and we plan to run some tests this week. If the issues persist, I think we will try option (3) next as we want to get this done as soon as possible.

We had also considered moving this to NaviServer but were afraid it would be an insurmountable task. It's encouraging to hear that it is not too much work 😊

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Posted by Gustaf Neumann on
As far i remember, i spent more time on bringing NaviServer's https driver to its current state (A+ rating) than adding changes to OpenACS to support NaviServer. Current OpenACS works with AOLserver and NaviServer, essentially based on the result of [ns_info name]. Many of the newer changes are not needed to for functioning, but for improved performance.

The link [1] shows the changes in packages/acs-* in chronological order (starting 13 years ago) to give you a glimpse what's needed.

-g

[1] http://fisheye.openacs.org/search/OpenACS/?comment=naviserver&contents=&addedText=&deletedText=&filename=%2Fopenacs-4%2Fpackages%2Facs*%2F**&branch=&tag=&fromdate=&todate=&datesortorder=ASCENDING&groupby=changeset&col=path&col=revision&col=author&col=date&col=csid&col=comment&refresh=y

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Posted by Jose Mendez on
Thanks, Gustaf. This is an excellent resource.