S3 is Amazon’s rather awesome data storage service. I’ll just note that it makes a great way of backing up your data; if you want to know more read Matt’s excellent overview.

We ran into problems setting up s3sync on a client’s system. Specifically SSL didn’t work, with the handy error message SSL Error:. That’s right, we were told there was an error put s3syncwouldn’t tell us what the error was. We tried using wget which wasnice enough to tell us we had a certificate problem. An hour of Googling later and the solution was this:

• Grab the CA Cert file (cacert.pem) from any one of the bazillion places on the Internet that mirror it.
• Copy it to /usr/lib/ssl/certs/cert.pem
• Set SSL_CERT_DIR and SSL_CERT_FILE to /usr/lib/ssl/certs/ and/usr/lib/ssl/certs/cert.pem respectively.
• Nothing more to do!

I found the Lynx documentation the most useful. The OpenSSL documentation was much less helpful.