first things first, do NOT use redhat 9, it is end of life, ie: not supported AT ALL, so using it means you are running the risk of being exploited, hacked, rooted, if you are not already.
use a modern day distro to do the same thing (supported) the latest 'red hat' departure is Fedora 7 and its very easy to install and use.
the rpm's are very easy to install in Fedora using the 'yum search openssl' and 'yum install' commands, yum wasn't even an option with Red Hat 9,
with fedora 7 you can install the ssl support with
Code:
yum install openssl.i386so, please dump rh9 and get f7 and come back here and we'll help you
cheers
anyweb