Ruby Mechanize https error

Question

I'm trying to do the following:

page = Mechanize.new.get "https://sis-app.sph.harvard.edu:9030/prod/bwckschd.p_disp_dyn_sched"

But I only get this exception:

OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv2/v3 read server hello A: sslv3 alert illegal parameter
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/net-http-persistent-2.7/lib/net/http/persistent/ssl_reuse.rb:70:in `connect'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/net-http-persistent-2.7/lib/net/http/persistent/ssl_reuse.rb:70:in `block in connect'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/timeout.rb:54:in `timeout'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/timeout.rb:99:in `timeout'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/net-http-persistent-2.7/lib/net/http/persistent/ssl_reuse.rb:70:in `connect'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/http.rb:755:in `do_start'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/http.rb:750:in `start'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/net-http-persistent-2.7/lib/net/http/persistent.rb:511:in `connection_for'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/net-http-persistent-2.7/lib/net/http/persistent.rb:806:in `request'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/mechanize-2.5.1/lib/mechanize/http/agent.rb:258:in `fetch'
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/mechanize-2.5.1/lib/mechanize.rb:407:in `get'
    from (irb):549
    from /Users/amosng/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'

How can I get the webpage to load in Mechanize?

Answer 1

Sometimes you need to tell mechanize to use sslv3:

page = Mechanize.new{|a| a.ssl_version, a.verify_mode = 'SSLv3', OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE}.get "https://sis-app.sph.harvard.edu:9030/prod/bwckschd.p_disp_dyn_sched"

Notice that I use OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE. That means you are theoretically vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack, but that's not something I generally worry about when I'm scraping a website.