After Server reboot you loose your SSL Bindings funcionatlity on your WCF Service

For some "supernatural" and "odd" reason sometimes you loose your SSL bindings in your WCF Services and you cannot test them even if the "netsh http show sslcert" command correctly shows the binding for the all the your WCF applications.

I saw this happen on several scenarios, allways after a server reboot, and most of times the issue was caused by some corruption on the Certificates stores of the Server (most of the time caused by an incorrect import).

The quickest solution for this odd behavior and put your WCF Services available again, would be, first delete the existing binding and re-enable the SSL binding as follows:

  • netsh http delete sslcert ipport=<ipaddress>:<portnumber>
  • netsh http add sslcert ipport=<ipaddress>:<portnumber> certhash=<certificatehash> appid={fullappid}
  • Then, we restart the WCF application service (windows service) and test the app which works correctly.

So, basically below are the necessary steps:
1. Delete the existing binding and cert from both personal and local machine account
2. Re-import the cert in local machine acc.
3. Add the SSL binding.
4. Test (browse the service @ https://<wcf url>servicename)
5. Reboot
6. Test (browse the service @ https://<wcf url>servicename)

Hope that helps