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Generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)

This topic applies to both Software Logger and the Logger Appliance.

Generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) is the first step to obtain a certificate signed by a 3rd party Certificate Authority (CA), for example, VeriSign. The resulting CSR must be sent to a CA, such as VeriSign, which responds with a signed certificate file. The CSR must be generated on the system for which you are requesting a certificate. That is, you cannot generate a CSR for System A on System B or use a third-party utility for generation.

To generate a certificate signing request:

1. Click System Admin from the top-level menu bar.
2. Click SSL Server Certificate from the Security section in the left panel to display the Generate Certificate/Certificate Signing Request page.
3. Click the Generate Certificate tab.

4. From the Enter Certificate Settings field, enter new values for the following fields:

   Parameter	Description
   Country	A two-letter country code, such as ‘US’ for the United States.
   State / Province	State or province name, such as ‘California.’
   City / Locality	City name, such as ‘Sunnyvale’.
   Organization Name	Company name, governmental entity, or similar overall organization.
   Organizational Unit	Division or department within the organization.
   Hostname	The host name or IP address of this system. When specifying the host name, make sure that this name matches the name registered in the Domain Name Service (DNS) server for the system. For Logger Appliances, this name must be identical to the host name specified in NICs. Note: If the host name or IP address of this system changes in the future, you must generate a new self-signed certificate or CSR. Once a new certificate is obtained, you must upload it to ensure that the connectors (in FIPS mode) which communicate with the system are able to validate the host name.
   Email Address	The email address of the administrator or contact person for this CSR.
   Private Key Length	Select the length (in bits) of the private key: 1024, 2048, 4096, or 8192.

5. Use the first two buttons to generate a CSR or a self-signed certificate. The View Certificate button is only used to view the resulting certificate.

   Button	Description
   Generate CSR	Click to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR).
   Generate Certificate	Click to generate a self-signed certificate.
   View Certificate	Click to view the generated certificate.

6. Choose Generate CSR to generate a certificate signing request.

7. If the CSR was successfully generated, a pop-up window is shown, enabling you to either download the CSR file or to copy/paste its content.

   To copy/paste, copy all the lines (inclusive) from -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- to -----END CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----.

8. Send the CSR file to your certificate authority to obtain the CA-signed certificate.
9. Once the CA-signed certificate file is obtained, continue on to Importing a Certificate below.

See Also