Visual Studio remotebuild for iOS fails with Error: self signed certificate in certificate chain

Question

I have a Mac mini configured as the remotebuild server. Remote building my cordova app to the Mac was working ok in secure mode for a while but I was suddenly greeted with a Error: self signed certificate in certificate chain.

I've followed several suggestions of running the commands,

remotebuild certificates reset
remotebuild certificates generate

then updating the pin accordingly in Visual Studio to no avail. I can build successfully when running in non-secure mode.

 remotebuild --secure-mode false

I've also tried cleaning my solution in VS2015, nuking the certs folder on the Mac and re-installing remotebuild. It may be worth noting that something in the build process was constantly corrupting the remote_ios.json file so I was having to keep removing that file to build every other time as explained here.

Any ideas on how to get around this error or why it would suddenly be a point of failure?

Answer 1

Also apart from those I did restart my client computer as well.

Answer 2

This "self signed certificate in certificate chain" error can happen if remotebuild generates a certificate under one identity (hostname / ip address) and is accessed via another one. The client will look at the certificate and find that it doesn't match what it expected, and so it does not trust the server. My guess is that it began failing for you due to a change in your network architecture.

If you know the identity that other machines will attempt to use, for example if they will use some.buildserver.local, then you can instruct remotebuild to generate a certificate using that identity via remotebuild --hostname="some.buildserver.local" --secure=true saveconfig && remotebuild certificates reset && remotebuild certificates generate.

Once you have created new certificates that should match client expectations, if you reconfigure them then they should accept the server's certificate.