Publish to web viewer over https when internal host name does not match the certificate domain name

Need

When the Web viewer requires SSL you will need to use a https server address with valid domain name to publish from Manager to Web viewer. But if the Web viewer's internal domain name does not match the name of the certificate, the web viewer will reject the publication. This how-to article will tell you how you can publish anyway to the web viewer.

Example

Two Web viewers are placed behind a load balancer. The load balancer's address is https://web.domain.com. The servers where the web viewers are installed have addresses https://web01.domain.internal and https://web02.domain.internal. A server certificate for *.domain.com is installed on IIS on the load balancer and both web servers. If you try to publish from Manager to https://web01.domain.internal the publication will fail since domain.internal does not match the server certificate address *.domain.com. The IP addresses of web01 and web02 are e.g. 10.20.20.1 and 10.20.20.2, but you can not publish to the ip addresses either since they are not accepted by the certificate.

Solution

Open the file C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and map the ip addresses of the servers that run Web viewer to a domain name that matches the certificate address.

In the example above, add the following two lines to the hosts file:

10.20.20.1 web01.domain.com
10.20.20.2 web02.domain.com

Now you can use https://web01.domain.com/AssertWeb and https://web02.domain.com/AssertWeb as server addresses for the publication. The addresses match the certificate and the publication will succeed.