Siege https error: HTTPS requires libssl

Question

I am having trouble getting siege to work with https. Running Siege 4.0.2 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with OpenSSL 1.0.2g preinstalled and libssl-dev 1.0.2g-1ubuntu4.6.

The errors
When I run it, I get a lot of these errors:
[error] HTTPS requires libssl: Unable to reach www.mysite.com with this protocol: Transport endpoint is already connected

And a couple of these
[error] descriptor table full sock.c:133: Too many open files

Then finally
libgcc_s.so.1 must be installed for pthread_cancel to work
[1] 18421 abort (core dumped) sudo siege -t 5M -d1 -c200 -f urls-f1.txt

My research
I found a couple of answers online for getting siege to work with https. For example, this thread on stackoverflow that says "configure using the --with-ssl option. Additionally, the openssl development headers must be installed".

Perhaps the best source is the INSTALL file in the siege package itself, which says:
To enable https, you must have ssl installed on your system. Get the latest version from http://www.openssl.org. AFTER ssl is installed, then you have to configure siege to use it:

$ ./configure --prefix=/some/dir --with-ssl=/ssl/install/dir

The openssl default installation is /usr/local/ssl. If you installed openssl in that directory, then you would configure siege like this:

$ ./configure --prefix=/some/dir --with-ssl=/usr/local/ssl
$ make
$ make uninstall (if you have a previous version already installed)
$ make install

I tried all these suggestions and found a couple more which said the same. But still I am stuck with the errors shown above. Perhaps I missed something or the latest software or OS has an issue. The next section shows what I did to set up the machine.

How I set up the machine
I am using a new VPS on DigitalOcean with Ubuntu 16.04.1 preinstalled. After setting up an additional user, SSH access and firewall, this is what I did to setup siege.

1. Update system
   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade --show-upgraded

2. Install GNU Compiler Collection
   sudo apt-get install build-essential

3. Install openssl development headers package
   sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

4. Download siege and extract
   wget http://download.joedog.org/siege/siege-latest.tar.gz
tar -zxvf siege-latest.tar.gz

5. Configure and install siege
   cd siege-*/
   find where openssl resides:
   which openssl use this info for the with-ssl flag
   ./configure --with-ssl=/usr/bin/openssl
make
sudo make install

My question
Please help me to get siege working with https URLs. In answering this question, please know that I am quite new to Linux admin stuff, so details on what to do are much appreciated.

Laceylach

Did you get this working? running into similar issue, and following their wiki for the setup :S wiki.mikejung.biz/Siege – Gorgeous

@kafka: yes I did get it working, see my answer below – Laceylach

thanks, i did try that but to no avail. turned out we were able to use HTTP urls instead so just went with that! – Gorgeous

Answer 1

Turns out the --prefix was needed to link up the libraries in my system. Even though installing seems to work fine and without errors if you don't supply that info. I set the prefix to the directory that siege was installing to before I supplied the prefix. So the installation ended up in the same directory but now it works with https.

This worked for me:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-ssl=/usr/bin/openssl
$ make
$ sudo make install

Laceylach

Answer 2

Do a 'make clean' before 'make install' to remove objects compiled without ssl support:

1. cd siege-*/
2. sudo make clean
3. sudo make install

Garwin

that's the one, make clean, the ./configure with the ssl params, then make install – Sattler

Answer 3

I first uninstalled whatever I had tried to install first, then I simply used Brew to install siege

brew install siege

and it worked out of the box

Innermost