I am working on a development server that is running only one website example.com, as well as running all of the subdomained user accounts someone.example.com. The server is running CentOS and I have created a self signed wildcard certificate for *.example.com. I have tested this certificate in Firefox as well as Safari and it works great in both browsers, I am able to get access to example.com as well as someone.example.com with no issue once I have accepted the certificate (the popup that says this site may not be safe).
The certificate works for example.com in all browsers, and when I go there (even with IE and Chrome) I am able to accept and install the cerfificate into “Trusted Root Certification Authorities”. When I test someone.example.com in Internet Explorer (version 9) and Google Chrome (version 20) I get a page saying “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” (IE) and “This web page is not available” (Chrome). I don’t even get a popup asking me to accept the certificate.
In the code for someone.example.com I have a statement to force https, but when I remove it the page loads fine as http://someone.example.com (but obviously not securely). This same code is running on the live server though and I do not have any issues accessing both example.com and someone.example.com on the live site with the wildcard ssl certificate that has been purchased.
I have been searching around and have found that similar issues were resolved by removing the certificate and creating a new one so I have done that, but to no avail. I have also tried several times to remove the certificate from IE’s cache and reinstalling it manually but that also has not changed anything. I have tested this issue on 1 Windows 7 PC, 1 Windows Vista PC, and 1 Mac; all are giving the same results.
I’ve had the same problem before, the way I was able to fix mine was that I:
It seemed as though without the reboot after uninstalling my first certificate attempts there seemed to be a bug within the certificate. Not sure why or how, but it worked for me.