Edit :- Tried to format the question and accepted answer in more presentable way at mine Blog
Here is the original issue.
My cacerts file was totally empty. I solved this by copying the cacerts file off my windows machine (that's using Oracle Java 7) and scp'd it to my Linux box (OpenJDK).
cd %JAVA_HOME%/jre/lib/security/
scp cacerts mylinuxmachin:/tmp
and then on the linux machine
cp /tmp/cacerts /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts
It's worked great so far.