Hi all. I have an intranet site with a core area that is public access,
but the rest of the site is SSL secured. I have a PostReadRequest
handler checking the port, and if it's 443 returning OK, but if not it
checks to see if the requested page is in the list of nonsecure areas
and exceptions. Anything not clearly specified as unsecured is sent an
external redirect to the same page on the secure socket.

This works great for most things, but there are a few consequences that
I just can't think around.

Specifically, other intranet sites link directly to relevant data
locations on our server. This is fine under normal circumstances, but
today I got a nastygram from a user for "changing" my access. Her
certificate had expired (along with several others in her office who
had all installed on the same day), and suddenly it was effectively a
dead link. Even once they had installed new certs, several of them were
still getting "certificate expired" because they had told their
browsers to use the old one by default.  

I have pages on the site to explain all this and provide solutions, but
these aren't exactly sophisticated users; someone helps them get it all
installed and then they remember the certificate password, and go from
there. When it expires, it never occurs to them to see if the server
root is still accessible, or if it does, to take the "s" out of the
protocol, which would let them get to the site (on virtually every page
of which we have a header link to "Digital Certificate Info").

The best suggestion I could come up with was to ask the linking site to
add a link to a nonsecure page, like our comment form.

Anyone have anything better?

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