Technology Insights

Use OpenSSL to Verify the Contents of a CSR Before Submitting For a SSL Certificate

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When purchasing SSL certificates for your website online you will be required to generate a SSL CSR, or Certificate Signing Request, to obtain a SSL CRT, or Certificate. In the process of generating your CSR you will be required to provide numerous pieces of information including Country, State, City, Company, Department, server common name, contact email address, and a challenge password. The most important field being the server common name as this is the domain that will securely serve web pages over HTTPS to make sure data is encrypted in each direction and because of this is secure.

Technology Insights

ISPConfig RapidSSL Certificate Not Installing Correctly

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I recently reinstalled a CentOS 5.2 server running ISPConfig using apache for virtual web hosting. The first site I was reinstalling the RapidSSL certificate for was not working. It continued to tell me that it was a non trusted self signed certificate. Eventually I figured out the only issue was that ISPConfig was not restarting the web server thus not taking the RapidSSL cert. Once I restarted the web server manually everything worked properly. A couple things to note though are exactly how to install a SSL Certificate with ISPConfig and how to regenerate the servers self signed certificate if necessary.

Installing a SSL Certificate for a Virtual Host with ISPConfig:

  1. Create Site: Create the hosting account using your typical methods with ISPConfig