So I was about to SSL-secure my new webmail setup, created a new cert on CAcert, installed it, configured my vhost accordingly, went to the webmail login page and… boom. Login was not possible. No error message, no log message, nothing.
What happened?
To make a long story short, the PHP superglobal $_POST which stores data from POST requests was completly empty, though a valid POST request has been triggered. Not even $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA was set and a hint I found on the net about a not set content-type didn’t help either.
So I went back to my vhost configuration again, where I configured a simple redirect for the *:80 vhost to the *:443 vhost. I copied over my original configuration (PHP FCGI) from the SSL one over to the non-ssl one to check if the problem also persists on non-SSL connections. And apparently it did not! Weird enough, now it even worked when doing the request over SSL…! Even weirder was, as soon as I commented out certain (uneccessary) options like ErrorLog from the SSL one, it broke again…
Something must have been messed with my FastCGI php processes – since I only did a reload after each configuration change before, I decided to make a hard apache restart – and voila! The problem was gone completly!
Hrm… this reminds me that there was this one operating system which could also be fixed by a restart. If I could only remember its name…
Stories of ye olde times… 😉
Hmm, that is odd. FastCGI is one bad mother though, who knows..