Self-Signed SSL Link not working

Question

I have an embedded web server with a self-signed SSL certificate. After I get past the Web Browser's warning about the SSL Certificate being self signed, I am seeing a difference between IE8 and Firefox 3.5.5.

In IE8, if I try to download a PNG file, it will download every time.

In FireFox, it will give me an error every other time.

The error message is this:

Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to 192.168.1.100.
SSL peer was unable to negotiate an acceptable set of security parameters.
(Error code: ssl_error_handshake_failure_alert)

*The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
*Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem. Alternatively, use the command found  in the help menu to report this broken site.

What is causing this? Why does one browser work all the time and the other only works every other time?

Answer 1

It's hard to say without looking at the packets. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be that on the second request, Firefox is trying to resume the SSL session, and for some reason, the server doesn't like that. On the next request, Firefox doesn't try to resume, and it succeeds again. Maybe?