SSL Handshake Error - Thanks for the replies!

I wanted to say thanks for all your replies with suggestions and offers to
help.

When I signed up for the mailing list I specified that I wanted to receive
the posts in a daily digest -- so I had not seen all your replies when I
finally sent my own followup...

Sorry if that was kind of confusing,  I think I'll change my settings for
the mailing list to get the posts individually.

I am not sure how I overlooked the setting of the sslCACert file in
/etc/sysconfig/rhn/rhn_register?  But apparently rhn_register and up2date
try very very hard to default to using ssl connections, using the default
RHNS-CA-CERT and https://www.rhn.redhat.com/XMLRPC address when none are
configured. While trying to continue working with the current server in
non-SSL mode I found it *almost* impossible to get rhn_register to contact a
noSSLServerURL!   I say almost because I got it to all work magically, once
mid-afternoon, then it all stopped working again, until I added the
sslCACert parameter and got SSL running again...

I have no idea how it started working or why it then stopped working after
my first update. If I ever figure out what happened this afternoon, and it
looks like useful information to share, I'll let you know.

-- Andrew