Today setting up SSL for a Apache HTTP webserver I run into issue, when browser shows that site is not accessible. At first I thought that SSL (443) port is not open, but looking in the Apache log file I saw this:
192.168.98.169 - - [24/May/2010:12:01:45 +0300] "\x16\x03\x01" 200 12332 "-" "-"
The place where GET request should be was “\x16\x03\x01”. Like some encoding problem I thought. The bonus to all this, was that I have test environment with the same settings, and everything worked under test server.
The problem was: I forgot to change IP address in Apache conf file that was left from test server configuration. Of course, Apache does not respond to address it does not have.
So if you get “\x16\x03\x01” in Apache log file, then you may have not configured Apache for HTTPS / SSL on that IP address.