Why is it that I have to manually install SSL certs on every single machine that runs BOINC? Why can't they include it in the installer, or download them remotely within the application? Even on newer machines running newer OSes, as soon as I upgrade to 8.2.8, no more work units.

Also I forget what I did to fix this a few months ago. I don't remember if the post was here or on the asteroids forum or maybe on reddit? Anyone have the directions for downloading and installing the cert (on mac)?

In reply to l008com's message of 7 Jan 2026:

Why is it that I have to manually install SSL certs on every single machine that runs BOINC? Why can't they include it in the installer, or download them remotely within the application? Even on newer machines running newer OSes, as soon as I upgrade to 8.2.8, no more work units.

Also I forget what I did to fix this a few months ago. I don't remember if the post was here or on the asteroids forum or maybe on reddit? Anyone have the directions for downloading and installing the cert (on mac)?

If your OS up-to-date, you should also have up-to-date certificates. If you don't have up-to-date certificates - this means your device lacks critical updated.
Also, it might be the case, the the project itself has their certificates outdated, and then if doesn't matter if you have updates installed or not, this connection will be refused because the project certificate is not valide anymore.
For quite a while already we rely on certificates installed on your system since this is the most reliable way to get certificates, and in case of the updated certificates we don't need to release a new version of BOINC, out users just need to have their devices updated.

---

BOINC maintainer.
For any insight, check my BOINC Development Blog.

Well the main project i'm crunching right now is Asteroids. I've had this problem on upgrading BOINC on a wide variety of versions of macOS, I think the newest one is Ventura, which is only a few years old. Those systems, and all of my other systems, all have all available updates run, but still every time I've gone ti 8.2.8, I've lost contact with asteroids and had to manually install some cert from somewhere (i forget the exact details)