Just installed this new PDS and it seems fantastic but as I near the completion of this journey I am getting this problem which I am sure is easily resolved but figured someone else will run into it and might as well post it here.

I am running PDS 5.1 on a windows 2003 enterprise server running SQL 2000 enterprise with SP4 and all is working correctly. I have installed PDS and point and all imports and syncs are completed with flying colors. I have setup this server in a certificate Auth cluster and issued a certificate called pdata for server fileserver and installed it in C:\ so far so good. I can login to admin and do all the necessary functions like create assign secure users and groups. 

when going into point administrator I am trying to link it to the PDS server which is https://myserver/service  I have also tried https://myserver/pds/service with no love

I get this message  " the underlying connection was closed : could not establish trust relationship with the remote server "

Now strangely enough this happens even if I type https://myserver/blahblahbs or any other garbled garbage path. So it makes me wonder why it wont auth.  This is most likely something simple but I have checked all angles so what am I missing. Any help would be great.

Nathan Clark
Network Operations
Point Lending / Jennwell Corporation
nathan@pointlending.com
http://www.pointlending.com

From what I understand you did not purchase your SSL certificate, but you created it on your own, sigining it yourself.  In this case, your client doesn't "trust" your SSL certificate until you update it with the appropriate Certificate Authority (CA).

Here are the steps to fix this:

1) On one of your client machines, close all of your browsers.
2) Open a browser and point it to your PDS Administration site (it should be something like https://myserver/admin).  Are you getting an SSL warning from within IE?  If yes, your client is not trusting the SSL certificate.  We must fix this before Point can securely connect to PDS.
3) What did you use to generate your certificate?  If you used Microsoft Certificate Server you can use the "Retrieve the CA certificate or certificate revocation list" option in the first page and then choose "Download CA certification path".  You'll end up with a *.p7b file.
4) Install the CA certificate on your client (you will need to look up the documentation to do so).
5) Close all of your browsers, open a new one and point it to https://myserver/admin.  You should now not get the SSL certificate warning (since your client now has your CA certificate and "trusts" your self signed certificate).
6) Open up Point Administrator and configure it to point to https://myserver/service.  You should now not get the "could not establish trust relationship with the remote server" error.

Note: if you self sign a certificate, you will need to install the CA certificate on every client computer where Point will be running.  This is by design: if anyone could sign their own certificate and it was automatically accepted by all browsers and clients in the world, there wouldn't be much of a point in creating SSL certificates.

That's one of the reasons Calyx provides a service for its customers so you can easily purchase and install a "real" SSL certificate that is trusted by all clients without additional setup.

If you'd like to avoid installing your CA certificate on every client, check out the following:

Q10168 - INFO: (v5.1) Appendix L - SSL Certificate
http://pdskb.calyxsoftware.com/article.aspx?id=10168

Calyx Software Secure SSL Services
http://ssl.calyxsoftware.com.

Hope this helps,

Emmanuel