How to install a digital CA certificate on Red Hat based GNU/Linux distributions

This is just as a reminder for myself, as I keep forgetting about this stuff.

If like me you run a server with services that depends on SSL and need to install a certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) like CACert, this might be interesting to you as well.

On Red Hat based systems the CA certificate for SSL is usually installed in the /etc/pki/tls/certs directory. The certificate is basically just dropped there in a file which name is its hash – built with the openssl program.

I wrote the shell scriptlet http://dodji.seketeli.net/install-ca-cert.txt. Download it, save it as install-ca-cert.sh and turn it into an executable.

Then, assuming your certificate is in a file named your-ca.crt, install it by doing:

sudo ./install-ca-cert.sh ./your-ca.crt

Voila. I don't know how that works on other distributions, though.

Update

A wise person taught me about the c_rehash utility from openssl, that does the same thing as my dirty script above. To use it, you need to install the openssl-perl package. Thank you, Daniël.

Syndicated 2011-08-21 14:25:00 (Updated 2011-08-22 08:27:27) from Dodji