Specifications

Preparing a Signed CA Certificate for Installation
Equalizer Installation and Administration Guide 177
Preparing a Signed CA Certificate for Installation
When you receive your signed certificate back from your CA, you’ll get one or more .pem files in
return, or you’ll get one or more mail messages from the CA. The files or messages contain your
signed certificate and any necessary intermediate certificates required by the CA’s chain of trust.
If you get your certificates in the mail, save each one to an ASCII text file with a .pem extension.
Make sure you use a text editor such as Notepad (Windows) or vi (Unix/Linux) to save the files as
text files.
Note that if you are using IIS, see the section “Using IIS with Equalizer” on page 182.
If you get only one certificate (the signed server certificate) from your CA, then:
1. Save it to a text file (e.g., servcert.pem for a server certificate, or clientcert.pem for a client
certificate).
2. Open a new text file and read both the signed certificate and your private key (in this order)
into the file. (The private key was created previously when you generated your CSR.) Save the
file as a plain text file. On a Unix system, like Equalizer, you can do this with a command like
one the following:
cat servcert.pem privkey.pem > clustercert.pem
cat clientcert.pem privkey.pem > clientprivcert.pem
Whatever method you use, the file should look like this when you are done:
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
...
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
...
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Make sure you save the file as a plain text file.
3. Install the file into Equalizer as instructed in the section “Installing a Server or Client
Certificate for an HTTPS Cluster” on page 178.
If the CA uses chained root, or intermediate, certificates, then you’ll receive (or need to download
from the CA) more than one .pem file: the server certificate, plus any intermediate certificates
needed to establish the chain of trust back to a Root CA certificate installed on your web server or
client browser.
If you get more than one certificate (the signed server certificate plus one or more intermediate
certificates) from your CA, then:
1. Save each certificate to a separate text file (e.g., servcert.pem, intmcert.pem).
2. Open a new text file and read the signed certificate, your private key, and any intermediate
certificates (in this order) into the file. (Your private key was created previously, when you
generated the CSR.) Save the file as a plain text file. On a Unix system, like Equalizer, you can
do this with a command like one of the following:
cat servcert.pem privkey.pem intmcert.pem > clustercert.pem
cat clientcert.pem privkey.pem intmcert.pem > clientprivcert.pem
Whatever method you use, the file should look like this when you are done: