On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Joseph Norris wrote:

Questions:

Do I have to get an ssl certificate to make it work? ( cost ouch!) Is there a way around this using my own self-signed certificates? Is there a cheaper ssl certificate service?

When I was an admin at acm.jhu.edu, I had us use the free certificates for .edu hosts given out by ipsca.com. They were compatible and well-supported, and signed by the right authorities to have no error messages. (Except in some totally weird interaction with Mozilla, for which we opened a bug and which I *think* is fixed.) You can toy with https://secure.acm.jhu.edu/ and connecting via SSL'd IMAP to secure.acm.jhu.edu (port 993).

For my personal servers, I use the "RapidSSL" certificates sold by Geotrust. I can't seem to find the link for the vendor I use, but they seem to be widely resold for around $10-15 a year. The only serious complaint I can find on the web is that if you use their bulk purchasing option, be sure to read the fine print - your ability to use the bulk-purchased certificates goes away one year after you purchased them.

As for how to set them up, I always follow the Apache mod_ssl instructions and then use the certificates everywhere else on my system.

As for if any of this is truly "necessary," no idea. (-: I did it because I wanted SSL/TLS.

-- Asheesh.

-- It doesn't matter whether you win or lose -- until you lose.

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Hi Joseph,

On 10 Mar 2008 at 16:53, Joseph Norris jnorris@ucmerced.edu said:

on outlook, a message for certificates being trusted comes up, the user clicks yes and connection fails.

I can't think why that should happen at all. Outlook uses the same SSL engine and certificate store as IE and IIS, I.E. the one built into the Windows NT OS. So at best it should just be a warning that the certificate isn't trusted that the user can just ignore. If not, it must be configurable somewhere in Outlook.

Do I have to get an ssl certificate to make it work? ( cost ouch!)

Theoretically not. But it would be useful to avoid the warnings and give the users a sense of security.

Is there a way around this using my own self-signed certificates?

Yes, if you import your certificate into the certificate stores of the machines your users use as a Trusted Root Certification Authority, you can use it to certify any host you like. It can be done in quite a few ways, including with Security Policy, with scripts or by hand.

Is there a cheaper ssl certificate service?

http://www.cacert.org/ . I've not got enough good things to say about them. The only real drawback is that initially the certificates only last six months a time, which turns out to be quite often enough for my small home site. :-) On the other hand, it's FREE! They have a nice script- driven installer for the Root Certificate on IE under Windows, which means even MS Exchange servers can be cacert-powered in no time allowing for inbound STARTTLS from them (Exchange defaults to paranoia and won't talk [returns mail] if SSL doesn't verify when available). Nice.

Cheers, Sabahattin

Sabahattin Gucukoglu Address harvesters, snag this: feedme@yamta.org Phone: +44 20 88008915 Mobile: +44 7986 053399 http://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/

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