FreeNAS woes involving certificates and HTTPS Everywhere

In my previous post, I unloaded on Chrome’s crappy handling of expired SSL certificates. I had to work around the fact that when trying to connect using HTTP with its FQDN (e.g. http://host.subdomain.ka8zrt.com), the browser would itself switch to HTTPS, and then refuse to let me connect due to the SSL certificate having expired. And so, I instead had to connect using the IP address. Using that route, I thankfully can get around the expired certificate, since the application in question (FreeNAS) happened to also be set to allow connections via HTTP, and did not either rely on name based virtual hosts, or use URLs which used the FQDN. Indeed, using the IP address in the URL (e.g. https://192.168.1.1), I got the following screen:

Notice… this has the “Proceed to…” link at the bottom, which the other screen I got when using the FQDN  did not. But going this route, I was able to both re-enable the ability to use HTTP as well as HTTPS, turn off forced redirection by the app, and thanks to some digging, find out how to change these two settings from the CLI.  And so, in case browsers across the board decide to do away with the “Proceed to” link in all cases, I am putting the info about changing the settings here for general consumption.

Being able to connect to the box using SSH and get to the shell (or login via the console), I was able to disable redirecting HTTP to HTTPS and  enable HTTP as well as HTTPS with the following command. The configuration is stored in a SQLite3 database, and as of this writing, the disabling of the redirection is done with the following command:

sqlite3 /data/freenas-v1.db 'update system_settings set stg_guihttpsredirect=0;'

and to enable the use of HTTP as well as HTTPS, the command is:sqlite3 /data/freenas-v1.db 'update system_settings set stg_guiprotocol="httphttps";'

If you want to check the settings, then you can do something like the following, which shows both the command and the response.root@nas:~ # sqlite3 /data/freenas-v1.db 'select * from system_settings;'
1|httphttps|en|America/New_York|192.168.1.4|0.0.0.0|80||::|443|0|1|1|+b5ou/urLTPPL7FsrRz5YvYetWIDEPaUooZypKSEZUo=|f_info

After making the change, a reboot using the CLI command on the appliance, a curl/wget command from another host (ignoring certificate issues), or other means will result in the config files being regenerated from the database, and your being able to at least use a browser which allows you to proceed even though there are issues with the certificate.

Note: Switching to include HTTP or just use HTTP instead of HTTPS, while still having the redirection turned on creates an interesting condition, where you will still get sent to the HTTPS URL, but will either be faced with the expired certificate behaviour or just fail to get a connection. Thankfully, the commands I just gave will save your bacon in that instance as well.

I will also add that I have never been a fan of storing critical configuration information which affects connectivity in a database on that host/appliance and regenerating flat files from the database, since I first encountered it in AIX on the RS/6000 boxes back around 1990 or so. Corrupt the database, or edit a file without realizing that it is one of those files which gets regenerated at reboot, or is ignored for the most part by the OS, and it will drive you to trying to put your own head through the walls of a spillway of a dam, sometimes months after you made the change. I understand why it is so very tempting, but when it is suggested, learn to say a very important word: NO! An XML file is fine, as is YAML, JSON, or some other text based format…but not a database… even a SQLite database. Think worst case scenario where you are limited to text.