I am trying to send a cURL request to a server with an IP address x.x.x.x . It is a part of an health monitoring system. On the server I have configured virtual hosts for subdomain.example.com on both port 80 and 443. For the ssl certificate, I am using a *.example.com wildcard certificate which I use on this server as well few more servers.
When I try to curl to http://x.x.x.x it get the response appropriately. But when I curl to https://x.x.x.x it give the following certificate error:
curl: (51) SSL: certificate subject name '*.example.com' does not
match target host name 'x.x.x.x'
I know this is because certificate is specific to domain name and I am trying to send a request using the IP address. But as I said this is a limitation that I have (rackspace load balancer health monitoring).
Is there a work around??
Best Answer
I'll make this a new answer, since it's going in quite a different direction. In fact it doesn't answer the question as posed, but is perhaps the direction the OP should be looking.
The usual configuration when using a load balancer is that the SSL certificate doesn't live on the web server at all, but rather the SSL is handed off to the load balancer.
The end user makes an HTTPS request to the load balancer. The load balancer unwraps the SSL, and forward the request via unencrypted HTTP to the web server, with a header that tells the Web server that the original request was encrypted. (important for embedding URLs in the response, and for avoiding serving secure content over http).