I tried to use cert = ssl.get_server_certificate((XXXX, 443)) and it crashed with following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "PeerCertChainQuery.py", line 107, in <module>
    cert = ssl.get_server_certificate((options.host, 443))
  File "/opt/lib/python2.7/ssl.py", line 965, in get_server_certificate
    with closing(context.wrap_socket(sock)) as sslsock:
  File "/opt/lib/python2.7/ssl.py", line 350, in wrap_socket
    _context=self)
  File "/opt/lib/python2.7/ssl.py", line 566, in __init__
    self.do_handshake()
  File "/opt/lib/python2.7/ssl.py", line 788, in do_handshake
    self._sslobj.do_handshake()
ssl.SSLError: [SSL: SSLV3_ALERT_HANDSHAKE_FAILURE] sslv3 alert handshake failure (_ssl.c:581)

Note that the configuration of apache server on the host XXXX has disabled ssl3 support and it only supports TLSV1, TLVS1.1, AND TLSV1.3.

This also happened on Python 3.4.3. 

    Much appreciated if you could have a look at what happened or suggest me how to get around this.

We should probably change the default value for the *ssl_version* parameter.
In the meantime, you can workaround this simply with:

cert = ssl.get_server_certificate((XXXX, 443), ssl.PROTOCOL_SSLv23)

It will be fix in 2.7.13 as part of my OpenSSL 1.1.0 patch.