Active Directory over SSL – banishing 8009030e to the land of wind and ghosts

This is one of those solutions where you’re not 100% sure why it works but it just does. If you’re tearing your hair out trying to get LDAP to run over SSL, and seeing ‘8009030e’ , give this a go.

I have a under appreciated AD 2008 server which we use to test with IBM Web Content Manager. Recently I had to get it integrated with WebSphere Portal over SSL. I was sure when I set it up all those years ago that SSL worked, but today all I saw was a reset connection and the following error message in the Event logs:


LDAP over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) will be unavailable at this time because the server was unable to obtain a certificate.

Additional Data
Error value:
8009030e No credentials are available in the security package


After one of those Googling sessions where you end up with 30 browser tabs and you get no closer whatever you try (making a new self signed cert, trying openssl instead, resetting permissions on random registry keys and folders) I thought – why not see if the certificate works with IIS?

IIS wasn’t set up to use SSL, so following the instructions here (start from “IIS manager”) I set up a binding to the SSL port and noticed that my new self signed certificate wasn’t in the list of possible certificates in the ‘Add Site Binding’ window. Looking up a few steps – it seems like there’s a nice button labeled ‘Create a self signed certificate’. Once I bound that to IIS, SSL worked fine from a browser. And wouldn’t you know it, then the LDAP over SSL started to work! I didn’t even need to restart AD. Worth a try right?