Creating a self-signed CA cert

[Steven Stromer]

>>>I want 
>>>to create a self-signed CA cert, which is most easily achieved using the 
>>>ca.pl script. This is no longer anywhere to be found, along with the 
>>>demoCA folder that one would normally expect to find. Can anyone shed 
>>>some light on where these files ended up? I can't find them on a search. 

>>The perl script is in the openssl-perl package.  The original split was
>>needed to keep the openssl package from depending on perl, which isn't
>>part of the "Base" package component/group.
>>
>>It looks like the generated data files would now be placed in /etc/CA,
>>but of course that's configurable in openssl.cnf.
>>
>>HTH,
>>
>>Nalin

> It seems to me that certificates can be created using :
> /etc/pki/tls/certs/Makefile
> -------------------------------------------
> Aaron Konstam

Thank you all for your replies. I was aware of the line:

'OpenSSL: the /usr/share/ssl contents have moved to /etc/pki/tls and 
/etc/pki/CA.'

in FC4's Release Notes. However, within the new path, there are many 
files missing that were available in the old path.

Nalin helped to explain some of the missing files by documenting that 
openssl and openssl-perl are seperate packages. That helps to explain 
some of the missing script files.

Before learning this I manually executed all of the commnands I needed 
to create my CA and host certificates and keys using openssl commands, 
which are easier to use, in my opinion, than the perl scripts that exist 
to help in these steps. But, that's just a matter of opinion, and I 
understand that there are a number of scripts that perform very 
convenient file conversion, that I may find myself reaching for sometime 
in the future.

For the moment, I've skipped installing the openssl-perl package, just 
to keep life as simple as possible (less to learn, secure, and just deal 
with!).

The Makefile is also very helpful for at least creating a pem styled csr 
(make certreq).

However, this is where the remaining missing files and directories come 
into play. I want to sign my newly minted request with my own CA cert, 
but I am getting errors having to do with the configuration of 
openssl.cnf. There seem to be a number of 'mistakes' in the CA_default 
section of the configuration file. The first attribute 'dir', has a 
value of '../../CA', which seems faulty to me. Worse, a few lines later, 
the 'crl_dir', 'serial', 'crl' and a number of other attributes have 
values that point to directories and files that simply DO NOT EXIST!

I have attempted to create some of the missing directories, which gets 
me past the first few errors when executing:

openssl ca -config /etc/pki/tls/openssl.cnf -policy policy_anything -out 
www.domainname.com.pem -infiles www.domainname.com.request.pem

but, eventually I get to errors relating to the missing files (ie. 
index.txt) and I grind to a halt.

Has anyone successfully created CA and signed their own certs using a 
'default' installation of FC4? Did you have to take any extraordinary 
steps to achieve this?

Thanks everyone for the responses. Sorry this is more involved than it 
first seemed.

Steven Stromer