Just over a year ago, I created a bunch of SSL certs following the instructions here: http://www.devklog.net/2008/05/25/generating-ssl-certificates-that-will-make-firefox-3-happy/

I’m having some interesting problems creating a new certificate to replace an expired one.

When I created a new certificate (as a leaf of a self-signed CA cert), to replace the expired leaf, I got a message saying that the certificate already existed.

I backed up and then deleted the expired cert and tried again, to no avail.

I saw this old thread which seems related to the problems I’m having, but the solutions there didn’t help me (I’m already manually picking serial numbers in the format yyyymmddnn, where nn is the number of certificates I’ve created that day, and deleting the Certificate Authority folder from Application Support in my home library didn’t make a difference either).

Anyone else had similar trouble? How did you resolve it?

I ran into some problems with Perl’s CPAN installer on Snow Leopard, notably, it didn’t work once Bundle::CPAN was installed. Every time I tried to install a package I’d end up with an error like this:

Catching error: 'Can\'t call method "value" on an undefined value at /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm line 64.
' at /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/CPAN.pm line 281
CPAN::shell() called at /usr/bin/cpan5.10.0 line 199

Not good. So, how to fix it? Move the broken IO::Uncompress module out of the way. In a terminal window, copy and paste the following

sudo mv /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/darwin-thread-multi-2level/IO/Uncompress/RawInflate.pm-broken

Once that’s been shifted out the way, it should work provided CPAN was configured with the proper paths to your tar, bzip2 and gzip executables (if not, nuke your /System/Library/Perl/5.10.0/CPAN/Config.pm and start over).

Note: This isn’t a long-term solution, some things like CPAN::SQLite won’t install if IO::Uncompress::RawInflate is missing, but at least it gets some functionality back into CPAN. I’m very interested in hearing of any better fixes for this.