[Help-gnutls] Re: FW: Newbie Troubleshooting Question...

[Simon Josefsson]

"Dave Tabor" <dtabor at mageeop.com> writes:

> Hi,  
>  
> I've loaded a software package (curl 7.15.1) and gnutls is one of the
> required requisite programs on an AIX 5.1 server .  I can use curl to
> retrieve page information from regular http://---- addresses, but when I
> go to a secure https://----- page, I'm getting the following error: 
>  
> curl: (35) gnutls_handshake() failed: -9 
>  
> My knowledge of gnutls, unix and SSL is limited, so I'm at a loss as to
> where to start with this one.  Any ideas? 

For starters, -9 translates into:

#define GNUTLS_E_UNEXPECTED_PACKET_LENGTH -9    /* GNUTLS_A_RECORD_OVERFLOW */

(btw, curl could use the gnutls_strerror function to translate into
humanly readable error messages.)

Alas, that return code is pretty generic, and often indicate some deeper
problem.  Does it happen for every https URL you use?

Does GnuTLS 'make check' succeeds?  You may want to try with something
more recent than 1.2.9 though, the latest stable release 1.6.2 contains
more self-tests.

I haven't tested GnuTLS much on AIX, so there may be some compatibility
concern.

You may want to start by getting gnutls-cli against the server to work,
before using curl too.  In other words, try:

$ gnutls-cli -d 4711 www.foo.com

and let us know what it prints.

Good luck,
Simon