I consume web services from an outside-of-my-firewall SSL server that requires clients to be SSL-authenticated (clients must pre-register).  My application server resides inside of my firewall.  I would like to access the aforementioned web services through a proxy in order to not expose my internal server hostname to the outside world.  I have tried to setup my SSL connection (e.g., using my client certificate, trusting the web service provider) from within my internal application server w/ the client certificate generated for the proxy (as opposed to the hidden application) server but the SSL server would not fall for it.  

Assuming that my initial approach is not possible, I would like to use an apache http server as my proxy-server/SSL-client.  My goal is to keep this apache server thin (i.e., only configuration, no extra java code).  Is there a way to configure mod_proxy and (specially) mod_ssl to do this very thing?

Here’s my proxy.conf template:

ProxyRequests On
<Proxy *>
   Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from internal_ip_address
</Proxy>

Cheers,

John.