Thanks for your comment. I am using Python 2.6 indeed. What I wanted to do was leverage the certificate verification that is offered by the ssl module (as shown in your code), but within the realm of the urllib2 module. Essentially, I wanted to leverage the high-level functionality of urllib2 while also benefiting from cert verification; unfortunately, even in 2.6 that functionality is not available without extending the classes as shown in my article.

Cheers,
Joseph

import socket, ssl

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

# require a certificate from the server
ssl_sock = ssl.wrap_socket(s,
ca_certs=”/home/vavarachen/google/ca-bundle.crt”, cert_reqs=ssl.CERT_REQUIRED)

try:
ssl_sock.connect((sys.argv[1], 443))
except ssl.SSLError, msg:
print msg

ssl_sock.close()

In order to generate my root CA bundle, I used firefox-db2pem.sh script.

Cheers,
VVK

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