Firefox complained of an expired certificate, but allowed me to make an exception to enter.

Validity "Not After Wed, 06 Aug 2025 23:59:59 GMT"

As I have said lots of times before, nothing to worry about.

I am just waiting for the new certificate to arrive from the provider and all will be well.

An apology is in order.

Two weeks ago I initiated the renewal process for the site's SSL certificate and it has been a bumpy ride since then. Unfortunately I made the stupid decision of sticking with the company that wrecked this website during a server migration some years ago now and they have managed to mess me about again, this time with the SSL certificate.

Tonight I went to a different provider (which issues the same brand of certificate), got the whole job done in about ten minutes and paid about 1/3 the price asked by the previous provider.

To be honest I am glad I am shot of those people and will never go near them again. They are still scratching their heads trying to work out where they went wrong whilst I am the one doing all the legwork. The philosophy of customer service is simply something that some companies do not understand and over the last 24 hours, it's been like trying to converse with a pack of grizzly bears whilst they are hibernating.

To all my long suffering members and guests, I apologise for the almost week-long disruption.

As always, thanks for the effort.

Do you care to name and shame the guilty? (Hints will suffice.)

Crazy Domains.

The only reason I stuck with them after they corrupted the database was because SSL is structurally a separate branch of the business (most of it is automated these days, regardless of the issuer) and the actual certificate issuer is an unrelated entity, and the price was lower than the big names in the game.

It just goes to show that the saying "once bitten, twice shy" is still relevant in this day and age.

Crazy Domains

Seems the name says it all!

The best company I have ever have seen is ICI, when I worked for them; with their customer service policy. They recognised fully that the customer was their life blood and it was your job, irrespective of where in the food chain you were to see that the customer got customer service.

There was none of this hours hanging on the phone to get the normal customer disservice from a certain Telco. It was demanded that the phone was answered by a real person preferably within eight rings. Then the person who answered through procedures had it sorted as quickly as possible. That way you kept customers. That way you survived and absorbed those who could benefit you.

Glad you hopefully have got the site sorted. Don't know what was wrong with the previous mob and they don't seem to know either. However, it was about as stable with them, as a bucket of weeping gelignite.

In my job I have to deal with lots of suppliers of goods and services. Generally speaking, the "service" bit is a misnomer these days because since the end of the virus lockdowns, it has become the pits and in some cases just non-existent and the occasional company will even dare me to look elsewhere, which I don't mind doing when it gets to that stage.

Going by post #2, it looks like you will handle things without prompting by me. Now, if only I can remember that, if it happens again.

So I came to apologise for upsetting you back then, but I was not able to.

Hi Brad, happy to wait until its sorted and thanks for all that.
I have family members in the IT and hosting business and hear lots of jungle tales.

Keep up the effort, its really appreciated.

Fred.

You didn't upset me Robert, so I hope this clears that up. I was frustrated but only with a company that I have a track record of difficulties with, so if I sounded terse, I am sorry for that. For the most part, I have always hosted this site in house. It's free and it gives me the opportunity to host it the way I want, which ultimately makes life easy most of the time. For a couple of years, mostly during the transition from copper to NBNCo, I hosted the site on Crazy Domains and it seemed fine for the first year but then they did a server migration and screwed it, corrupting my databases (there's more than one site) and refusing to accept responsibility for it so after I shifted abode I took the hosting job back for myself and tried as best as one can under such circumstances to repair the database so the site is in some way useable. I am of the opinion that the occasions where the site returns HTTP 500 errors, is an issue left over from those fateful times because the site never had that issue prior to Crazy Domains hosting it.

If was my battle with them that forced me into retirement from web development. I just got tired of the constant frustrations the issues pushed my way and decided that enough was enough and a bout of anxiety and depression that I was also suffering at the time (which went away after about 18 months, thank Christ) was the straw that broke the camel's back. I guess I hid that well but I also didn't spend that much time on here, only being here long enough at that time to make sure things were still working and upload member's photos and articles.

These days, when things are going fine, coming here is therapeutic because the site, despite its issues, is a place that is now rare on the Internet. I've been on the 'Net long enough to remember that the only way to get a message across, or bring a larger number of people together in a common cause was to build and run a website. We are talking pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, and even before Google and Youtube and Ebay were a thing. Paul Stenning in Great Britain and Alan Voorhees in the United States have also done a great job keeping their respective forums going and there is some work involved even though it can be rewarding if a new site becomes popular. There's the risk of server failures, severed connections, UPS meltdowns, broken network equipment, the site being hacked - we've all been through most of those things here, aside from the latter as far as I can tell anyway. So there is a lot that a webmaster has to go through so things like dealing with a mob that cannot correctly send a customer a new SSL certificate is just one thing I do not need at my age.

Anyway, the good news is that as there is quite a lot of competition out there in SSL world, I was able to find another provider whose system is better and I was able to get a new certificate at a lower cost. I can barely believe how little time it took me and the whole process was automated. As soon as I provided them with the CSR file it was only a matter of minutes before the certificate was e-mailed through. Once the certificate was loaded on to the server, it was a matter of binding it to Port 443 and te job was done for another year.

and the job was done for another year

Why cannot these SSL certificates be renewed automatically? As I understand it there is no reminder from the provider that expiry is approaching, thus making diarising this for years ahead a necessity.

It's a process that requires human intervention for the foreseeable future. As mentioned above, I have to get on the server and generate a "certificate request" which is a text file that contains a very long hashed string of text, which our eyes cannot interpret but computers can understand. I then send this file to the certificate provider, who then passes it to the issuer, who then makes the certificate file based on the information in the text file.

They then send the certificate, which I upload to the web server and then bind it to port 443, which is the HTTPS port.

This job can be 'outsourced' as some companies do offer to do the lot, but I don't trust anyone with access to the web server for several reasons. Imagine if I did give that job to a certain company and they managed to find a way to stuff things up permanently. It'd take me weeks to build a new server and upload the backups to it - and then get yet another SSL certificate because the certificates cannot be shifted between servers.

Thanks Brad for all your efforts keeping this forum running.

The fact that the number of members continues to rise steadily is a testament to th value placed on this forum by the vintage radio community. It is a unique and truly useful facility and thanks Brad for putting up with the problems that arise from hosting.