Upgrade to Lenny, everything down :(
How annoying, I upgraded from Debian Etch (Apache 2.2.3-4) to Debian Lenny (Apache 2.2.9), and then my Subversion Server (over HTTPS) gave the following error when surfed to from Firefox, which worked fine before:
An error occurred during a connection to svn.example.com.
SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)
What does that mean!? There’s not a great deal of info on the web.
Fundamentally, in my case, the first thing to work out, is that that error message means (or meant, in my case at least) HTTP was being transmitted over the HTTPS port, i.e. it wasn’t valid HTTPS at all, thus the protocol error. This could be confirmed by surfing to http://…:443/ (i.e. not https://) and seeing that the content (the Subversion server in my case) was correct.
The question was why? I had a bunch of sites in the “sites-enabled” directory, and another one of them (not my Subversion site!) had a
<VirtualHost *>
whereas it should have been
<VirtualHost *:80>
i.e. the port was missing. I’m not quite sure why it had that effect, as the request to the Subversion HTTPS URL did deliver the Subversion content, just not over HTTPS any more. But perhaps without the :80, it decided all ports should be subject to NameVirtualHost, and as that’s not possible with HTTPS, switched HTTPS off for all ports and all sites?
Nightmare ….
See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/119336/ssl-error-rx-record-too-long-and-apache-ssl