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If I try to save the URL https://www.uni-ms.de/de/ using the Wayback Machine (archive.org), I get the following response:

Wayback Machine error

However, the site is perfectly fine, and I haven’t been able to find anything strange in the HTTPS certificates or HTTP response headers, either: https://www.uni-ms.de/de/. Saving the HTTP version http://www.uni-ms.de/de/ works without issues, too. What’s the problem here?

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There's something about the way this server uses SNI that is incompatible with Java's libraries:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.uni-ms.de

So no, our crawler can't talk to it over https. I haven't seen this particular problem before.

This one works: http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.uni-muenster.de/de/ you can see the save I just made.

Surfing the tubes of the Internet, this appears to be a change that the server could make to not confuse Java. See this answer to SSL handshake alert: unrecognized_name error since upgrade to Java 1.7.0.

[Earlier I claimed I had saved it, I wasn't paying attention and I was actually looking at an earlier snapshot.]

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  • Unfortunately, the problem does not seem to be transient for me at all – in fact, I’ve had this problem with this specific domain (uni-ms.de) on HTTPS for weeks before posting here. What do you mean by “it worked”? There are no snapshots of the URL in June.
    – Socob
    Jun 7, 2016 at 17:45
  • So a a problem with the server’s HTTPS setup which only Java complains about… Interesting, since the other alternate domain (wwu.de) doesn’t have this problem. Yes, the content is the same on those alternate domains which do work with the crawler, so those can be used to archive content – I was mainly asking “in the interest of science” to figure out if this might be a bug in archive.org. I’ll ask the owners of the website if they can/want to figure out/fix the problem.
    – Socob
    Jun 9, 2016 at 16:44
  • Yeah, we do appreciate you asking, we hadn't seen this before and we may try to make a run at convincing Oracle that this really is a bug on their side.
    – Greg Lindahl
    Jun 9, 2016 at 19:51

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