Issue: [4.1 Alpha 1] Admin CP: Version check connection error. Update: Still occurs as of Beta 3

This occurs because the certificate chain expired on February 1. Since the chain is always included in the download to ensure that the software trusts our server but no impersonators, unfortunately a drawback is that the bundled chains eventually expire. The next release will include the new certificate chain.

How frequently does this chain update? I guess this explains why the VW4.0 XF1 builds sometime show the same connection error. During page load, VW4.0 flashes up 4.1 Alpha 1 build 003 before replacing this with the error.

I'd suggest the following for consideration:

• In XF2 VW4.1, lose the unordered list element containers for the error (it looks out of place in blockMessage).
• Consider retaining on screen the last cached new version information, with the server error displayed elsewhere, i.e. underneath. Or even display a generic link pointing to a vaultwiki.org to manually view the latest version details.
• (Kind of a moot point given the infrequency of alpha periods? Also a feature idea & not a bug.) Have the ability for a site to ignore 'unstable' (alpha, etc) builds in the version checker (e.g. for XF1 sites on VW4.0 only interested in 4.0 releases until 4.1 progresses out of the alpha stage)

It varies but in general a certificate authority's root certificate is good for about 5 years. As long as our server certificate uses the same certificate authority, we should generally have up to 5 years of version checking without all users needing to update VaultWiki to get an updated bundle, regardless whether we renew our server certificate every year.

The one for the company we use was set to expire in 2020. However, it seems like that certificate authority changed their company name last year, so when our server certificate renewed this year, the authority's name did not match any more. The authority's certificate, which will be rebundled with VaultWiki, still expires in 2020.

This means that we should have the same problem again next year. But after that I would expect it to last about 5 years unless they change their name again.

A link to check manually on a connection failure is a good idea.

Interesting, I didn't realise that Comodo rebranded. You'd think this situation would be a rarity and unlikely to happen again anytime soon. Thanks for the info.

Hi, has the new certificate details make it into Alpha 2 build 001? Version check still shows "Unable to connect to remote server". In vw_log, there are currently no rows with a logtype of 'changelog'

Also, I noticed that this version check error isn't formatted into a list anymore. It looks much better now, IMO.

Cheers

With Alpha 3 build002 (XF2.1) in a new installation, version check still suffers an SSL error:
"SSL certificate problem: unable to get issuer certificate"

I replaced the second section of the crt file beginning with MIIFdzCCBF with the key beginning with MIIF3jCCA8 (from the old crt file with the three sections). With this change, version check works as expected.

This happens for me as well with v4.1.0 Beta 3 Build 001:

Thanks for confirming that this also affects you, SeToY. If you're comfortable with editing the certificate ca.crt file contents (e.g. with notepad), I'll send you a PM.

Changing the thumbprint has, indeed, fixed the problem. Maybe pegasus might consider this in future releases. Cheers!

This change has been applied to the certificate chain in Beta 3 build 002.

That's awesome, thank you .

I also just want to point out that the previously fixed missing min/compiled JS folder issue (#5799) has resurfaced with the Beta 3 b001 download. I redownloaded Beta 2 b002 and that version does contain the min/compiled JS folders.

Thanks, I've added a warning to our package generator so that it will hopefully catch when it forgets to generate the folder automatically, that way we see the warning and can generate it manually.