Resolved firefox ssl_error_expired_cert_alert

I was getting the error ‘ssl_error_expired_cert_alert’ in Firefox. I checked my client certificate and it hadn’t expired. I checked my CA certificate and it hadn’t expired. It turned out that the problem was that my ca.crl Certificate Revocation List had expired. I fixed that by running jj5-bin empathy-ca-update-crl which says:

echo Updating CRL...
openssl ca -gencrl -config ca.cnf -cert cacert.crt -out ca.crl.pem -crldays 365
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
  echo Error updating CRL.
  exit 1
fi

echo Exporting CRL to DER format...
openssl crl -in ca.crl.pem -outform DER -out ca.crl.der
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
  echo Error exporting CRL in DER format.
  exit 1
fi

echo Viewing CRL...
openssl crl -in ca.crl.pem -noout -text
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
  echo Error viewing CRL.
  exit 1
fi

Firefox prompting to download application x-trash from Apache2

I was changing a HTML file index.html to be a PHP file called index.php and I renamed my index.html file index.html.bak. The plan was that Apache would find index.php rather than index.html and serve that as the default page. But when I went to load my page Firefox was asking me if I wanted to save the file with MIME type application/x-trash — not what I was expecting! It turns out the problem was related to the index.html.bak file, apparently Apache had decided that was the default page and then when it tried to get the MIME type for .bak it came up with application/x-trash. So the solution was to move the index.html.bak file to something with a filename that didn’t begin with ‘index.html’ (I used ‘original-index.html’) and then once that file had been renamed the index.php page was served properly.

How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above

Found some instructions about How to open file links in Firefox 1.5 and above and I’m going to try it out just as soon as I can reset my browser.

Basically you add something like the following to your user.js file which is in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile]\user.js.

user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "localfilelinks");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.sites", "http://www.example.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.localfilelinks.checkloaduri.enabled", "allAccess");

Internet explorer support for file URIs

The URI file://bender-xp/C$/ works in an anchor tag in IE8 to open the \\bender-xp\C$ file share on my network. In this case bender-xp was the name of my local machine but it works for remote file shares too (I tested it to a Samba share on another box).

Unfortunately my version of Firefox (version 9.0.1) doesn’t support this.