Ben Cull - Payments Engineer and Microsoft Development Professional

Run Multiple SSL Websites on IIS6 Using a Wildcard Certificate

I came across this problem whilst setting up a UAT environment at work. Having not dealt with SSL certs before, especially on the older IIS6, it was actually a little challenging to figure out.

What’s the Problem?

It turns out that when using SSL, you can only have one website bound to one IP address at a time. Lame. Luckily you can get around this, as long as your websites all use the same certificate, a wildcard certificate.

Trying to configure and start two sites using the same cert, port and certificate will result in this error: Imgur

IIS was unable to start the site. Another site may already be using the port you configured for this site. Please select a unused port for this site.

The Solution: Enable Multiple SSL Bindings

I’m not sure if this is purely an IIS6 problem, but to solve it we need to go to the command line.

Whip open a command prompt and navigate to the following location: C:\inetpub\adminscripts\. If this location doesn’t exist and/or it doesn’t contain a file named adsutil.vbs then follow these instructions to Install Missing IIS Admin Scripts before moving on.

Now, still in the C:\inetpub\adminscripts\ folder, enter the following command for each website that you would like to bind:

cscript.exe adsutil.vbs set /w3svc/<site identifier>/SecureBindings ":443:ssl1.example.com"

The <site identifier> can be found by clicking the Web Sites folder icon on the left hand menu in IIS6 as shown below: Imgur

Of course ssl1.example.com should be replaced with your own host header.

That’s It. You should now be able to start both websites successfully.

Run Multiple SSL Websites on IIS6 Using a Wildcard Certificate
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Run Multiple SSL Websites on IIS6 Using a Wildcard Certificate

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