Redirecting a domain without an SSL to one that has one

Question

Our company has recently changed the domain name for one of our produce websites, and wants all traffic from the old to be redirected to the new.

Right now that comes up with a privacy error as the ssl is on www.newdomain.com instead of www.olddomain.com.

Is there anyway to redirect www.olddomain.com to www.newdomain.com without it reporting this error? My suspicion is that I will need to install an SSL on the old domain as well but would like to avoid this if possible.

I have so far attempted to do this via the vhost and/or htaccess, and aliasing the old domain in the new domains conf file, eg:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]

Answer 1

You need an SSL certificate for both domains. In order to redirect from one to the other you first need a certificate for olddomain.com and www.olddomain.com so that browsers will accept the redirect instruction. You then need a certificate on your www.newdomain.com to host the new domain.

So you would setup a virtual host for the old domain which only redirects to the new one.

See apache Redirect.

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName olddomain.com

    Redirect permanent / https://www.newdomain.com/

    SSLEngine on

    SSLCertificateFile      /path/to/olddomain.com/cert.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile   /path/to/olddomain.com/privkey.pem
    SSLCertificateChainFile /path/to/olddomain.com/chain.pem

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName www.newdomain.com

    DocumentRoot /var/www/html

    SSLEngine on

    SSLCertificateFile      /path/to/www.newdomain.com/cert.pem
    SSLCertificateKeyFile   /path/to/www.newdomain.com/privkey.pem
    SSLCertificateChainFile /path/to/www.newdomain.com/chain.pem

</VirtualHost>