Am running Ubuntu Server 12.04 on a VPS and supporting multiple websites running LAMP. One of the sites is configured for SSL and is running an application built using the Cake PHP framework. The administrative interface for the application interacts with the MySQL server (installed on the same server) and since we introduced SSL (https) into the mix, some forms aren't able to retrieve data from the MySQL database when users access them using https (these are drop downs the are pulling their lists from a table in the database). If one forgoes SSL and comes to the same URLs via http only, no issues. Nothing specific is showing up in the Apache or PHP logs.
My developers are suggesting that this is a server configuration issue. I'm not so sure.
I'm green regarding what's possible from a sniffing standpoint, but since I can easily replicate the use cases where we are not able to retrieve data, I would love to find a way to sniff the traffic to uncover why we can't retrieve the data from those forms.
What would be a way of getting the type of verbose logging that would show the request from the app and it's interaction with MySQL?
You can use the general query log in MySQL.
I'd take a guess and say that what you're either experiencing a Cross-Origin Request or a Mixed Content (secure/unsecure) problem.
Again, this is a guess because you haven't given enough detail, but if your forms dynamically load the dropdown information through AJAX, and if they have http:// hard coded in the AJAX URL (i.e. you loaded the page through https://yourdomain.com but the ajax is trying to load from http://yourdomain.com) then it's not going to work due to one of the problems I mentioned above.
The solution is to ensure that the AJAX calls use the same protocol as the original page load. The easiest way to do that is to omit the protocol altogether (e.g. //yourdomain.com) when making the request.