Hey all:

We use curl to retrieve webpages, and recently started receiving an
intermittent (40-60% of the time) error when retrieving a page from the
CIA. About two weeks ago, they switched to running https only, with the
http URLs being forwarded to the https equivalents.

The error we receive is:

$ curl 'https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/faqs/'
curl: (35) Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to www.cia.gov:443

Using the --trace option, I see this:

== Info: About to connect() to www.cia.gov port 443 (#0)
== Info: Trying 198.81.129.100... == Info: connected
== Info: Connected to www.cia.gov (198.81.129.100) port 443 (#0)
== Info: successfully set certificate verify locations:
== Info: CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
  CApath: none
== Info: SSLv2, Client hello (1):
=> Send SSL data, 124 bytes (0x7c)
0000: 01 03 01 00 63 00 00 00 10 00 00 39 00 00 38 00 ....c......9..8.
0010: 00 35 00 00 88 00 00 87 00 00 84 00 00 16 00 00 .5..............
0020: 13 00 00 0a 07 00 c0 00 00 33 00 00 32 00 00 2f .........3..2../
0030: 00 00 45 00 00 44 00 00 41 00 00 07 05 00 80 03 ..E..D..A.......
0040: 00 80 00 00 05 00 00 04 01 00 80 00 00 15 00 00 ................
0050: 12 00 00 09 06 00 40 00 00 14 00 00 11 00 00 08 ......@.........
0060: 00 00 06 04 00 80 00 00 03 02 00 80 c9 f7 89 ff ................
0070: 74 f1 92 59 c8 a0 f1 ba ab c0 dd 89 t..Y........
== Info: Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to www.cia.gov:443
== Info: Closing connection #0

Unfortunately, I don't grok SSL hex :-).

I have tried this and received the same error with the following versions:
curl-7.12.1-8.rhel4 / openssl-0.9.7a-43.14
curl-7.12.1-11.el4 / openssl-0.9.7a-43.16
curl-7.16.1 / openssl-0.9.8e
curl-7.17.0 / openssl-0.9.8f

Firefox does not seem to have any issues with this page.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if I can
provide more information.

Thanks!

-Jake
Received on 2007-10-23