10.4: Resolve an iCal publishing problem

Aug 22, '05 09:30:00AM

Contributed by: jms1

Tiger only hintAfter replacing my hard drive and re-installing Tiger on my machine, I discovered that iCal was no longer able to publish my calendars to my web server -- I have a Linux web server running Apache and WebDAV for a certain directory tree, on an SSL-enabled web site.

The error message was so helpful:

Publish failed for calendar "blah"
Unexpected secure name resolution error (code -9812). The server name secure.domain.xyz may be incorrect.
The log file on the web server didn't show any successful connection. However, a little bit of work with Ethereal (a free packet sniffer) revealed that iCal was indeed connecting to the server, but the SSL negotiations were failing.

The fix was to run Safari (which I don't normally do, I prefer Firefox) and visit the SSL web site where iCal is trying to publish the calendar. When Safari complains about the SSL certificate, I turned on the "Always trust this certificate" checkbox, and clicked "Continue." It asked me to authenticate, and then added the certificate to the "X509 Anchors" keychain.

At this point, I had to quit iCal entirely, but when I started iCal again, it was able to publish correctly.

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