iPlanet Web Server 4.1 Certificate Request Problem

Bill Smith

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Apr 28, 2000, 3:00:00 AM4/28/00

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Has anybody successfully obtained a trial certificate from Verisign with
a certificate request generated by iPlanet Web Server 4.1? In the admin
interface, I fill out the form and generate the request. When I submit
it to Verisign, it comes back and tells me I have a field that is too
long. (They don't tell me which one!) I've double checked this a few
times and none of my fields are even close to the limits that Verisign
is telling me.

=====================
Bill Smith
iXL, Inc.
bsm...@ixl.com

Robert F Petrie

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May 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM5/1/00

to Bill Smith

You're talking about the free 14-day SSL certificate, I believe. If you
follow my previous posts about Methodically tracking ..., you'll get a
flavor of what I did for NS Messenger and IMAP/S. Should be the same for
https. First, have you verified that the VeriSign root certificates are
valid. They all expired at year end. There's a zip file with four new
certificates. I think the "Methodically..." thread says where. Install
those first if you haven't altready.

Then, when you want to install a trial certificate, generate your request
via Email to one of your accounts, not to VeriSign. Copy the certificate
request info, I believe there's even a button to copy it to the clipboard.
Then go to http://www.verisign.com, fill in a lot of the same info all over
again, paste the certificate request into the appropriate dialog box and
have them Email it you you.

Then back to the wizard when you receive it. Do NOT forget to set up the
sslpassword.conf file, see page 179 of the NS Messenger Admin Guide or
similar for Enterprise guide. If you don't you'll get a message about not
finding private key.

Are you running under NT, Linux, Solaris or what? But to answer your
question, yes, I got both VeriSign and Equifax trial certificates to work
(under Linux).

HTH

SHU LIU

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Jun 12, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/12/00

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Hi Robert,

The following is the message I posted to another newsgroup.
After I read your message, I thought probably you may help me.

Could you please take a look ?

Thank you.

---------------------------
(I posted this in a wrong thread last week. This is a repost.)

Hi,

My name is Shu Liu. I am using Enterprise Server 4.1.
I am trying to install a trial certificate key from Verisign
to enable SSL. After I click "Add Server Certificate", it always
shows an error dialog box:

"Unexpected Failure: cannot write
There was an error while writing certificate file".

I tried many times, it was always same.

Is there anybody having seen this problem ?

I do appreciate if you can give me any hint that I can
look into it.

Thank you and best regards,
Shu Liu

Super-User

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Jun 13, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/13/00

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Many times this indicates a problem with the key pair file. The file
https-<serverid>-<host name>.key3.db does not contain the public key data. You
will need to make a new key trust database to correct this.

SHU LIU

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Jun 13, 2000, 3:00:00 AM6/13/00

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This message helped me a lot.

I didn't realize when generating CSR, it actually updates
<server-root>/alias/*.db files
and those files will be used later (for the key match).
I might reinstalled iWS 4.1 before I received the certification from
VeriSign.

Right now I successfully turned on SSL.

Thank you very much.
Shu Liu