I’ve got an odd little problem at work. I’ve got a Ricoh copier in the Traverse City office that I apparently now can no longer manage remotely due to an error in SSL. The error that Firefox throws is ssl_error_weak_server_cert_key and in Google Chrome it’s ERR_SSL_WEAK_SERVER_EPHEMERAL_DH_KEY. In both situations I understand what the issue is, that the SSL layer is weak because the Diffie-Hellman key is not big enough.

I’ve run into this issue before, mostly with self-signed certs and the browsers have usually allowed me to click on an exception and get on with my day. Except for Firefox and Chrome now, that is no longer the case. The browsers just refuse to display the webpage. I understand the logic behind it, everyone wants a more secure web, but sometimes what we are really after isn’t privacy or security, but rather just getting our work done.

I still need to connect to this copier and manage it, and frankly my dear, I don’t really care that much that the transactions be secure. In a way, this security is irrelevant. The traffic on our WAN is flowing over a Meraki VPN site-to-site link, so it’s already secure. This is security on top of security, and it’s in the way.

So I thought about using the awful Internet Explorer for this and I chafe at even considering using one more wretched bit of Microsoft technology – there has to be a better solution. So when you run into little bits like this the best way forward is to pursue my favorite solution, heterogenous computing! There’s more than one way to get what you are after. So if Firefox and Chrome won’t work, and Internet Explorer is unthinkable, how about Opera?

So I downloaded Opera and installed it. Then browsed to my copier in Traverse City. Opera told me about the error, but it also provided me with an exception button and then once I clicked that, the error was bypassed and my copiers remote management screen appeared.

So now I’ll add Opera to all the other browsers I have on my computers. The answer is competition. I wonder sometimes if there isn’t a special browser out there for IT type people like me. They’ll render anything, ignore any “privacy or security” type errors, all so people like me can get our jobs done. For now, Opera seems to lead the pack, at least for this. Thank you Opera!