Last week, Rushabh started poking me about enabling SSL on redefine's webserver, so that we could post to our blogs securely. This has been on my TODO list for awhile, so I decided to start down this long, dark road on Saturday. After decoding much of the SSL certificate generation and Apache configuration crap that I needed to go through, I found out that the version of Apache that I was running didn't have SSL support compiled into it.
Drat.
So today, I uninstalled my old apache, and installed a new one that had mod_ssl compiled in. At first, everything was going swimmingly. I got Apache to agree that my new SSL-enabled config file was okay, and then restarted it. All was well, but SSL didn't work. I found that I had to use the 'startssl' instead of the 'start' parameter. And of course, after I figured that out, all hell broke loose.
To make a long story short, first apache wouldn't start. Some googling told me that mod_ssl rejiggers Apache's internal API, requiring all modules to be re-compiled. Great. After a tense half hour comprised of a lot of hacking (and apache getting random bus errors later), I managed to recompile all of the PHP crap, and now things appear to be stable.
whew
-Andy.