[Probably OT] Strange loss of ability to do SSL (through curl)

Bob Sneidar bobsneidar at iotecdigital.com
Tue Jan 20 14:12:24 EST 2015


I suspect whatever system you are connecting to has modified in some way how it encrypts data using SSL. Sounds crazy, but Microsoft recently did something to their TLS in their cloud offerings that summarily prevented an entire series of Konica brand copiers from sending email through Exchange Online. Other series Konicas were fine, and other manufacturers didn’t seem to have a problem either. I was the only one saying Microsoft had made changes to their TLS. No one would listen, citing all the other copiers that still worked. 

Finally Konica released a bulletin telling us to install special firmware and make some changes in the security settings on the affected machines. What settings you ask? Why, the TLS settings of course!

Bob S


> On Jan 20, 2015, at 10:59 , Ben Rubinstein <benr_mc at cogapp.com> wrote:
> 
> An app built in LC, sitting on an old box (PPC Mac Mini running 10.4.11) has for several years happily been running a few times a day to perform a batch job involving retrieve some data from a remote system, processing it, and pushing a report to a new location.
> 
> Recently, it's not been updating correctly, and investigation has shown that the cause is a failure to retrieve the remote data.
> 
> The remote system (a third-party SaaS product) has a REST interface, accessed with simple basic authentication over HTTPS.  I'm not aware that anything has changed in their API recently.
> 
> When I first wrote this app, I found that LC didn't correctly deal with the SSL portion (I forget the details); so I recoded it to use the shell function to invoke curl to retrieve each element.
> 
> This has worked fine for a long time.   But now the shell command is returning code 35, which according to man curl is:
>  35     SSL connect error. The SSL handshaking failed.
> 
> So the weird thing is:
> - if I run this app on my dev machine (Intel Mac running 10.8.5), it works fine, happily invoking curl and getting the result
> - if I run the curl command in Terminal on the target machine, it works fine and retrieves the data
> - if I create a shell script to run the curl command on the target machine, and invoke that shell script in Terminal, it works fine and retrieves the data
> - if I modify the app to use 'shell' to run that shell script, instead of calling curl directly, it fails with code 35 again.
> 
> So curl, and shell, are happy on that machine; but using shell in an LC app to either invoke curl directly, or run a batch script which invokes curl, makes SSL fail.
> 
> I've marked this possibly OT because I don't think it's necessarily an LC problem.  I get the same result with a version of the app built in 2011 from LC 4.6.4 as with one built now with LC 6.5.2.  But then again, I'm not aware that anything has changed on the machine where this runs.
> 
> Something must have changed; my guess is that it is something in the setup of the remote service.  But the nature of that change doesn't disturb curl or shell running under Terminal on my target machine; nor when invoked from LC on my dev machine.
> 
> I'm guessing it must be something to do with the environment in which the shell command operates when invoked from LC, as opposed to launching a terminal window.  This goes considerably outside my knowledge area, so I'm appealing for suggestions as to where to investigate...
> 
> TIA
> 
> Ben
> 
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