A strainge problem..client authentication

Question

HI,
I am able to work out an application which beside server cert authentication also has client authentication. For server i have created a cert using keytool or jdk1.4 and having its public key in client's trusted store.for client crt i have installed a 60 day Personal certificate on IE. i have exported this cert from IE and hence included its public key in trust store of server and keep its keystore for client authentication.. everything works fine...
say this was a tomcat server on my machine on which i originally installed personal sertificate..say it machine A....now on some other machine on same network for another tomcat i have created another cert using keystore and accessing it..i am having its public key also in the client truststore...i have also kept client's public key of personal cert in the trust store of server of machine B...but for this server it works only without client authentication...
for both machine/servers i have done perfectly same thing..both server has client's public key and client has both servers public key in their respective trust store...i have checked it using the IBM key Man...
the only difference is that A is the machine on which i originally installed the personal certificate..
Any guess or idea...why it might be happening...its killing me...
Akhil

Answer 1

Hi,
i could not find anything suspicious happening in log files...however today i tried to find out access the same server on machine B using my browser IE on my machine A. This is the browser i installed my Personal Certificate. Now its public key is present in trust store of tomcat on machine B.
Hoeever when i accessed it . browser prompts with a list of empty list of client certificates...but when i try to access the my local machine (A) server it prompts me with one certificate..
why is this..what i understand is that "if i am having a personal certificate from some CA installed in my browser,then whatever secure website which needs client authentication i access,my browser should prompt me with the list of certificates installed.." "whether that website has my public key in their trust store or not".....am i correct??....now why my brorwser shows empty list when i access server B and a list with one certificate when i access server A..
any thoughts...
Akhil Nagpal