multiple ssl certs and common name wildcards

lustikus · 2010-07-17 08:41:37

Hi

Now that the arch forum has a CAcert SSL certificate, I'm interested in getting one for my server as well.

CAcert is really fine and I had no issues getting a working cert.

But there's one thing bothering me:
When I get myself a cert, I have to specify a Common Name (CN) when creating it.
This name seems to be very important for the later usage of this cert.
For example, when I put "www.example.org" as my common name, I can only have www.example.org secure, not example.org or mail.example.org.
So I found that you can use a wildcard in the common name, like: *.example.org.
This helped a lot, but I still cannot have https://example.org secure this way.
My next idea was, to get two certs, one with the wildcard, one with "example.org" as CN and put them together in one .pem file for lighttpd.
But this does not work.
The only solution that comes to my mind is redirecting example.org to www.example.org,
but there has to be a simple way to solve this, please help

Pierre · 2010-07-17 09:46:11

I had a similar issue once. The point is that *.example.com does not include example.com. So you have to add both: *.example.com and example.com. There is a nice script to create one: http://wiki.cacert.org/CSRGenerator

lustikus · 2010-07-17 10:01:02

thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for, it works.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-07-17 08:41:37

multiple ssl certs and common name wildcards

#2 2010-07-17 09:46:11

Re: multiple ssl certs and common name wildcards

#3 2010-07-17 10:01:02

Re: multiple ssl certs and common name wildcards

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