OpenSSL Is a Pain

– Warning: Technical –

Today I had the joy of dealing with a particularly annoying problem at work. What should have taken me about two minutes to set up, ended up taking an hour and a half and four people’s time.

To understand this post, you first need to know a little bit about how some of our software works. Most of the modules in our software talk to external data sources, pulling in content and feeds from different types of backends the client may have. We have some modules however, that talk to our own internally developed backend. Our own backend we’ll call the content server (CMS), and the consumer we’ll call the application server (app server).