Oxla: Fixing a 2-year-old Bug -- A Journey with Debugging SSL Handshake

Building Oxla, a distributed OLAP database, involves not only achieving speed but also ensuring compatibility with major data analytics tools like QuickSight, Looker, and PowerBI, which adhere to PostgreSQL standards. The team's recent focus was on supporting the Google PostgreSQL Connector for Looker Studio, but an unexpected issue arose with SSL connections when using pgbouncer, a lightweight connection pooler. Detailed investigations using tools like Wireshark revealed that the problem lay with missing 37 bytes in the 'Server Hello' message, which was critical for the connection. By downgrading to TLS 1.2, the team identified the absence of the "Certificate Request" distinguished names section as the root cause. After modifying the pgbouncer source code to include SSL_CTX_set_client_CA_list, the issue was resolved, and the solution was successfully merged into the pgbouncer repository two years after the issue was first reported. The experience underscored the importance of thorough analysis and community collaboration in addressing complex technical challenges.

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