117992 - thawte.com - Blank page when clicking on Thawte link

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P2)

Description

[John Unruh]

1.) Visit http://www.thawte.com/cgi/enroll/personal/step1.exe to apply for a 
free trial thawte cert. Fill out all of the info and wait for your email to 
arrive with instructions on how to retrieve your cert
2.) OR, click on the link above.
What happens: I get a blank page.
What is expected: A basic auth login should appear.

Comment 1

[John Unruh]

Changing to evangelism.

Comment 2

[Jacob Steenhagen]

When I tried this I did it from
https://www.thawte.com/cgi/personal/cert/status.exe?status=<req_num>.  After you
get the e-mail telling you that a certificate is ready, a button will appear at
the bottom of that page (up reloading :) that says "Fetch this Certificate!". 
This button is a submit button for a form that contains one hidden element
(status=<req_num>) and is POSTed to deliver.exe.  Clicking it caused the
throbber to spin for a couple seconds then return to its resting position with
the status.exe page still in tact (please note that I was already authed from
the visit to status.exe amoung other pages).  Under IE, this same set of actions
brought up another page that contained an "Install your Cert" button.

I tested using Mozilla on linux and IE6 on Win2k.

Comment 3

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

John, why did you flip this to evang?

Comment 4

[John Unruh]

This method of getting certs from Thawte used to work. It's possible that this 
is a regression in N6 or that Thawte has changed its scripts. cc'ing asa.

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Either they have changed something at their site or something is broken in our
networking or authentication. I don't know which. Does it work with older
mozilla or Netscape6.x builds?

Comment 6

[Arun Ranganathan]

Not all the right people are CC'd.  I personally doubt this is an evangelism
issue, so I'm cc'ing ssaux.

Comment 7

[John Unruh]

Clicking on the above URL does not work in 6.2 or 6.2.1, even though it used to. 
I just get the same page back. With today's trunk build, I get the same results, 
except if the URL happens to be in yahoo mail, then I get a blank page. So, it 
appears that the web site has changed.

Comment 8

[mozilla3eran]

Considering the fact that Thawte Freemail is currently the only way to get a
free and widely-recognized X.509 certificate, this issue is quite critical for
S/MIME support (bug #74157).

Comment 9

[John Unruh]

nsbeta1. I agree with the comment right above.

Comment 10

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 134306 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[John Unruh]

*** Bug 139426 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Jacob Steenhagen]

Even though I hate these types of comments, I'm gonna make one :)

This still seems to be a problem in the recent build I downloaded
(2002090304)... even though it is marked as 'nsbeta1', it doesn't appear that
anything has happened since this bug was reported 9 months ago.  There was a
little discussion about if this is a code issue or an evang. issue.  I
personally have no way to test this as I don't know of any other place I can get
a browser cert, esp. w/out shelling out some cash.

BTW, my most recent test was using build 2002090304 on WinXP.

Comment 13

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Ok. their home page give you a 

Error: event is not defined
Source File: http://www.thawte.com/
Line: 21

when clicking on the personal email cert stuff, so treating this as pure evang
for the moment.
 
personal-certs: [e-mail], 
support: http://www.thawte.com/html/SUPPORT/index.html, [e-mail]

Comment 14

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

contacted.

Comment 15

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

This issue appears to be resolved. I was able to obtain a cert. Please confirm
that you can proceed through the registration process. 

I have also communicated with them regarding the DHTML. No word on that yet.

Comment 16

[Jacob Steenhagen]

I couldn't get it on the build I was using, but I just updated my build to
2002103008 and it all worked fine.

Comment 17

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

ok. On the email notification i received containing the deliver.exe link,
clicking the link to install the cert returned a blank page which is the problem
reported here. I then checked my account page and then checked for the cert
which was installed. Not sure if the deliver.exe actually installed the cert or
if I did that from my account page.

I reported this to their issue tracking system.

Jake what build did you use? Did the deliver.exe install your cert? Was the page
it opened from Mail blank for you? 

Comment 18

[Jacob Steenhagen]

I was running 2002102004.  I didn't click on the link in the email, I went to
the Certificate Status page and clicked on fetch.  w/1020 it didn't appear to do
anything.  w/1030 it asked my for my master password and after I typed it, it
didn't appear to do anything, but when I went to the Security page for my
account in mail/news and went to configure the digital signing pref, the cert
was there.

Comment 19

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

ok. this is definitely a usability issue now. We can install our certs but have
a hard time figuring out that we successfully did accomplish it. Will follow up
when thawte responds to my suppor ticket. -> normal

Comment 20

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

can someone else reproduce this problem any more? Since I have a cert from them
now, I am not that interested in getting another.

Comment 21

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

tech evang june 2003 reorg

Comment 22

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

->default

Comment 23

[Patrick]

Looks like the site has been redesigned but still has issues.
http://www.thawte.com/email/index.html
Click LOGIN.

This gives you a 
"Authorization Required
This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document
requested. Either you supplied the wrong credentials (e.g., bad password), or
your browser doesn't understand how to supply the credentials required.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an
ErrorDocument to handle the request. "

On IE, a pop-up window appears where the user can logon. 

Right now it looks like it's not possible at all to request/install certificates
from Thawte.

XP Pro SP2[rc1] and Moz 2004071008.

Comment 24

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

wfm