Secure Sockets Layer

Secure Sockets Layer Organic Design procedure

Our convention is to keep all the certificates in /var/www/ssl along with the the SSL virtual host definition for the domain (see install a new server for details on Apache configuration). First change the current directory to /var/www/ssl and create the certificate with the following command format. Ensure the common name (cn) is entered as a wildcard such as *.foo.com so that the certificate applies to all the sub-domains such as www.foo.com or webmail.foo.com etc.

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -days 3650 -nodes -x509 -keyout foo.com.pem -out foo.com.pem

Ensure that the resulting file is accessible by the web-server:

chown www-data foo.com.pem

Check the cert with this command:

openssl s_server -cert /var/www/ssl/foo.com.pem

The following output indicates the cert is working correctly

Using default temp DH parameters Using default temp ECDH parameters ACCEPT