Connect Computer to PDU to create CSR

[Hsnow]

Hello,

I was reading through the documentation for using the NMC utility and Security Wizard to generate a CSR for a PDU to send to a third party signing authority. As I was reading through the documentation, there was nothing specified that I need to log onto the PDU to generate the request. Does the NMC Utility/Security Wizard generate the CSR based off my computer or does it somehow connect to a PDU? Do I need to start a console/SSH session with a PDU and then generate the CSR using the utility? How does the PDU recognize an SSL connection when the CSR was generated on my computer using the NMC Utility/Security Wizard?

Thanks!

[Shaun · Accepted solution]

Hi @Hsnow,

No connection to the PDU is required until the resulting certificate needs to be installed.

The process goes:

• A CSR is created by the wizard, based on the inputs given to it at runtime.  A private key is also created during this step.
• The CSR is sent to a CA to be signed, and a PEM-formatted certificate is expected back
• The wizard is re-run using the 'import' function to combine the private key and the signed certificate, and output the certificate in the format (.p15) the PDU expects.
• Finally, this resulting .p15 file is uploaded to the PDU (via ftp, scp, or via the web UI), and the management interface is restarted.

The process retrieves no values from the PDU, it's very dependent on the correct values being passed to the tool when generating the CSR.  (These values are usually more dependent on DNS etc rather than any state the PDU holds.)

[Hsnow]

Thank you Shaun!

I got the cert to upload to my PDU. I did have to use the NMC Security Utility v1.0.0 rather than the Security Wizard to combine the generated cert + .p15 (as discussed on this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/kdopip/trying_to_create_ad_signed_cert_for_apc_ups/). When I would use the Security Wizard to combine the two files and upload them, the PDU would be stuck on "Installing Certificate...".