Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes an option to ignore all Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate name warnings for a specific index management server.

The certificate name might be mismatched (generating certificate name warnings) for several reasons. Commonly, names are mismatched if the server name changes or if only a single certificate is purchased for multiple sites in a company. However, the mismatched name could also represent an attempt to "spoof" the validity of a site. Spoofing refers to the practice of tricking users into providing passwords and other information to allow unauthorized access into a system.

You should ignore certificate name warnings only if you trust that the sites crawled by the index management server are legitimate. The setting to ignore name warnings applies to all content sources on the index management server. You must recrawl content after this setting is changed. As with all changes that reduce the amount of content that is crawled, three full updates must occur before any previously-crawled pages are excluded from the content index.

It is recommended that you limit ignoring certificate name warnings to internal sites. If you are crawling internal and external sites, you can configure one index management server to crawl internal content only and to ignore warnings. You can configure another index management server to crawl external content only and to obey warnings. If you configure a server to obey warnings and a warning occurs, the update fails and no more pages are crawled from that content source.

Specify the SSL certificate warning configuration

1. On the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration for server_name page, in the Component Configuration section, click Manage the Search Service.
2. On the Manage Search Settings page, in the Servers and Topology section, click the server name.
3. On the Search Server Settings page, in the SSL Certificate Warning Configuration section, select the check box if you trust that sites are legitimate even if their certificate name does not exactly match.
4. Click Apply.