Firefox HTTPS error ssl_error_rx_record_too_long
Posted by pcfinch on March 11, 2009
I just had an interesting problem when accessing a HTTPS (SSL) service in Firefox. I got the following error message.
SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)It turned out the the HTTPS service (on port 443) was not actually a HTTPS service and it was configured as a normal HTTP service. The initial connection from the browser was communicating in HTTPS, and expecting a security certificate, but instead it was getting back the normal HTTP “Bad Request” HTML. A confusing error message, but an easy problem to fix.
Leonardo Borges said
Hi Peter!
What was your fix to this problem?
I’m having the same issue but haven’t found a way to fix it.
Tks
pcfinch said
I changed the server so that it had a HTTPS server (SSL) on port 443 instead of a normal service.
dwight said
I hit this on my debian installation. If you look in /etc/apache2/sites-available and sites-enabled/, make sure that if there is a “default-ssl” in the ‘available’ directory, that it’s also linked in the ‘enabled’ directory. Until I did this, I was getting the error.
basically, apache is listening on port 443, but doesn’t know that it’s supposed to be using SSL on that port, until you configure it to do so.