web2py - Getting the admin panel to work remotely

I have spend sometime looking at the web2py framework the past few days, as i was looking for a python based framework for a project.
My first impression is that it has some nice features but as with all "frameworks" the learning curve can be steep.

After going through the manual over the weekend i decided to take the plunge and install it in a dev machine.
This is a vm machine running Ubuntu server, so there is no local browsing capabilities everything is done over the network.
Got web2py installed, run the server and then tried to access the admin interface from my remote workstation and got this.

Admin is disabled because unsecure channel

According to the documentation the admin and appadmin only work from localhost and remotely via ssl (ssh tunnel or https)
Looking at what it takes to config Apache to test-run web2py i decided i need another simpler solution.

I found this blog post that had instructions on how to get web2py going with a self-signed certificate and gave it go.
(Note that there are some typos in instructions given in the blog, but its easy to figure them out)

So i created the certificates and tried to access web2py from https this time.
No i was getting a strange error in Firefox

SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.

(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)

The problem was that web2py was still sending http and not https to the browser, so probably the https was not working

I used the command line switches of web2py and provided the exact path to the certificates

python web2py.py -a pass -i 192.168.1.3 -p 8000 -c /etc/ssl/self_signed/server.crt -k /etc/ssl/self_signed/server.key

and got a new message form web2py

WARNING:root:OpenSSL libraries unavailable. SSL is OFF

It turned out that Openssl was installed on the dev machine but the python bindings were not.
so issuing a

sudo aptitude install python-openssl

solved this and remote access to web2py's admin console was available over https.