Hi Wolfgang,

there is a chicken-and-egg problem with name-based virtual hosts
and SSL. The SSL connection is established *before* HTTP communication,
so the SSL server does not know what Host: HTTP header will be sent
in the moment it decides which SSL server certificate to send.

So for SSL HTTP servers, each server needs its own IP address,
virtual named-based hosts are not possible.

There is  a solution for this problem, it is a change in the SSL protocol
which allows to send host name in the SSL handshake. However it is not
supported by all web browsers.

For details see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#The_fix

In a nutshell, if you want to support MSIE on Windows XP, you cannot use it.

I solve this by using one IP address for all SSL servers with the same DNS 
domain owner,
and a SSL server certificate that has all the server names as subjectAltNames.
That works for all browsers, but it is some hassle to create a new certificate
for all names each time a new SSL server is added.

Cheers

Martin

Dne 21.1.2011 22:18, wolfgang.mi...@geigerus.com napsal(a):
Hi,

I am not too familiar with Apache, so the following message has stumped me.

[warn] Init: Name-based SSL virtual hosts only work for clients with TLS server 
name indication support (RFC 4366)

Can somebody explain what that means and what are the consequences?

Thanks so much!


Wolfgang


--
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Supercomputing Center Brno             Martin Kuba
Institute of Computer Science    email: ma...@ics.muni.cz
Masaryk University             http://www.ics.muni.cz/~makub/
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