Method Community

We had a report come in that the following message was being given back by the MethodAPI yesterday:

"The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship with remote server"

We renewed and upgraded the secure certificates on the Method servers on Monday night, which I think must be the cause of this.  I experienced the same thing on my browser on the Method web site (which uses the MethodAPI to list recent blog posts, as well as all signups and app library listing).  After restarting my own computer, it was fine, though, and other computers that didn't already have the website open were fine right away.  My concusion was that it was simply a browser caching of the previous certificate data, and restarting cleared the cache.

Things to test first:

1. Is this happening on multiple computers? 

2. Does it happen on computers that have never used your app before? 

3. Does it happen on multiple browsers on the same computer, or just your default browser?

4. Are you able to visit https://www.methodintegration.com/methodapi/service.asmx directly and see a list of all MethodAPI requests?

My recommendations:

1. While holding SHIFT down on your computer, right-click on your web page, and choose reload / refresh.  This should force your browser to reload all cached content.

2. Restart your computer.

3. If the problem persists, try going to your actual web app project and removing the web references to the MethodAPI, closing your project, reopening the project, re-establishing the web references, compiling and re-publishing your web app.

4. If the problem still persists, try restarting IIS on the web server hosting your app.

Let us know if that solves it for you.  And if you can, let us know what step solved it for you in case other developers get the same issue. 

My apologies for any inconvenience this has caused you. 

Paul

 Thanks for your response...

I am still getting the same error ssl message. Here is what I have done so far.

1. Made sure Methods was added to my trust list on my IE browser

2. When into one of my ASPX projects and Updated the Methods Web Server

3. Re-boot my machine

4. https://www.methodintegration.com/methodapi/service.asmx ... I'm able to access this url with no problem

Will try on a few diff. machines and see what happens.

Keith,

You shouldn't have to add Method to the trust list.  To truely test things out, I would remove that listing if I was you, since your users shouldn't have to do that.

Also - what happens if you try through FireFox on the same machine?

Are you able to run the app locally in your web project (I'm guessing Visual Studio), using localhost?

Paul

Paul,

We tried your recommendations but have not been able to solve the API "Underlying connection was closed" error problem.  We cannot restart IIS as our web site is hosted by Godaddy.   Everything worked fine until recently, so it looks like the renewal and upgrade of the SSL is the likely cause.  

I need your help to get this fixed.  My company just sent out a large number of marketing documents to try to increase business for both us and Method, and those have links to this Demo that uses the Method API which no longer opens from the link.

The demo link is www.infoontheweb.net/qbmobile/demo , and clicking the DEMO button is where the API error message appears.    Can you look into the SSL set up and see if you can get it back to where it was when it was working fine on this demo site?    We need get the APIs working from this Demo site, and I need your help to get it done.

Thanks.

    Dave

We need to narrow down the root of the problem.  The fact that you can reach the page directly indicates that your browser is not having an issue with the certificate.

As per my previous question: Are you able to run the app locally in your web project (I'm guessing Visual Studio), using localhost?

 Hey Paul.. it does run OK when I run using localhost..

Keith

 Hey Paul.. it does run ok with localhost.

Keith

We did some research.  The fact that it's on Godaddy was the tip off we needed.

The new certificate is an Extended Validation certificate - it gives it a cool green bar, and marginal security improvement (like it would take 12000 monkeys typing randomly on a keyboard 5 million years to decrypt an SSL stream instead of 4 million years).  .

Extended Validation is a little pickier from some hosters, like GoDaddy.  We had to make a small tweak on our end so that GoDaddy would get validated for the web service.

Do you want to try it again now?

That did it... thanks so much..

Keith 

Great to hear Keith.

Thank you for the quick replies and for the information you provided.  It helped us get to the bottom of it quickly.

Paul

Paul,

The SSL caused error message "The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship with remote server" has come back.   Please look into and fix.   If necessary, please bring the SSL back to what it was when it was working fine.  Let me know if there's anything I can do.  Thanks.

Dave

 The problem is fixed now.  Thanks for taking care of it.

  Dave