Testing SSL-enabled Websites from the Command Line

# openssl s_client -connect www.ibm.com:443

You can use openssl or other SSL based tools, such as stunnel (http://www.stunnel.org), to test secure web servers. For example, you can use this command to connect to IBM's website using HTTPS. It will display details about the SSL protocol and server certificate for the connection. You can then issue a GET / HTTP/1.0 command and press Enter and get a response back, just as if you had used Telnet to connect to a regular web server on port 80 to issue HTTP requests by hand, as shown in Chapter 1.