Safari keeps changing a website to "secure"

Have you tried resetting Safari by selecting "Reset Safari" from the Safari menu (next to the Apple in the top left corner)

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- Vince

i have tried the Link you told us and don't experience the autoredirect to https on my PPC based PowerBook. (Safari on 10.4.6)

You need a valid digital certificate to enter the encrypted (https) site as a security measure. I guess you can obtain one from Dartmouth to correctly authenticate yourself against the server.

Have you tried resetting your Safari?
MacLemon

Hello Jane:

For what it is worth, I typed in both URLs on my G4 and G5 iMacs. They both (https as well) point to the same page. In other words, the web site ignores the https prefix.

If you have not done so, clear the Safari cache. For "good luck" I would also trash the preference file (com.apple.safari.plist).

Next would be the suggestion to reset Safari and, finally, to reinstall it.

Barry

Message was edited by: Barry Hemphill

Don't get me wrong, but certificates etc. reside in your keychain, not in Safari. You could also easily backup them before resetting Safari. The same goes for your Bookmarks, Cookies, whatever. Noone said you should not do backups!

It's still strange that the intel Mac redirects you automatically, no PPC machines seem to do this.

Maybe try with another user on that intel Mac! That way you can see if it's Safari itself that has a problem or if it is some setting within your user.
MacLemon

Hi,

Trashing the file Barry refers to will not affect your certificates, bookmarks, history or autofill settings.

Try accessing the Dartmouth site from a different user account to see how it behaves there. This will help us to know whether your problem is local to your account or a system wide problem. If you don't have another account you can use System Preferences -> Accounts -> [+] to create a test one (and [-] to remove it if needed)

This happens on my MacBook Pro as well. I can open the page in Camino, but I get the -1205 error when I try to open it in Safari. I've noticed this problem for a while with sites at Dartmouth but only recently with the home page.

I have a certificate from the Dartmouth Certificate Authority in my keychain and it doesn't help this problem.

I emailed webmaster@dartmouth.edu about this problem and here is the response. The solution of getting a valid Dartmouth certificate doesn't apply to non Dartmouth users, so I'm not sure what to do in that case.

"You need to check your Keychain. The reason you are getting that error is because Safari is sending a Client Certificate back to the web server (which asked for it), but the web server can't verify that it's a good certificate. This usually happens when you have an expired certificate, or you have a non-Dartmouth certificate that Safari is likely sending because it can't find a Dartmouth one."

"Whichever of these is the case, the solution is to get a valid Dartmouth certificate, which you can generate by going to https://collegeca.dartmouth.edu/ and following the directions on the web page. If you have an expired Dartmouth cert, you will need to delete that before you import your new, valid certificate."

"The reason all of this is happening is specific to Intel Macs. The mechanism that Dartmouth has used, better than 7+ years, to authenticate browser users to web site (Kerberos) uses the SideCar helper application. This application doesn't run on Intel Macs, and it most likely never will. Fortunately, Dartmouth installed client certificates as an additional/alternate solution for web site authentication a few years ago. Since client certs work great on Intel Macs, we had to force Intel Macs to always use HTTPS when connecting to any site on www.dartmouth.edu. That way we can always be able to ask for your client cert, so that we don't break your ability to access protected sites that live on the www.dartmouth.edu server."

Yes, I had many emails back and forth with the webmaster and other people at Dartmouth yesterday. I'm a graduate student in computer science at Dartmouth, so perhaps that helped too. In any case, it should work now.

If anyone is interested, the problem was that the web server was asking Safari on intel macs for a certificate, Safari was returning a certificate used by iChat AV for encrypted chats, and the web server was rejecting this certificate since it could not verify authenticity. It wasn't a misconfiguration of our browsers or security settings, it was just a situation that the webmaster thought was very unlikely when they decided to make the entire site secure.

Welcome back to Apple's Users Help Users Forums.
Hi Jane Evans,
Glad the problem is fixed. You got some great help. You have rewards to hand out.
Gold Star = Helpful = 5 pts w 2 available and Green Star = Solved = 10 pts.