Users Guide

Authority is a business entity that is recognized in the Information Technology industry for meeting high

standards of reliable screening, identification, and other important security criteria. Examples of CAs

include Thawte and VeriSign. To initiate the process of obtaining a CA-signed certificate, use either

iDRAC Web interface or RACADM interface to generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) with your

company’s information. Then, submit the generated CSR to a CA such as VeriSign or Thawte. The CA can

be a root CA or an intermediate CA. After you receive the CA-signed SSL certificate, upload this to iDRAC.

For each iDRAC to be trusted by the management station, that iDRAC’s SSL certificate must be placed in

the management station’s certificate store. Once the SSL certificate is installed on the management

stations, supported browsers can access iDRAC without certificate warnings.

You can also upload a custom signing certificate to sign the SSL certificate, rather than relying on the

default signing certificate for this function. By importing one custom signing certificate into all

management stations, all the iDRACs using the custom signing certificate are trusted. If a custom signing

certificate is uploaded when a custom SSL certificate is already in-use, then the custom SSL certificate is

disabled and a one-time auto-generated SSL certificate, signed with the custom signing certificate, is

used. You can download the custom signing certificate (without the private key). You can also delete an

existing custom signing certificate. After deleting the custom signing certificate, iDRAC resets and auto-

generates a new self-signed SSL certificate. If a self-signed certificate is regenerated, then the trust must

be re-established between that iDRAC and the management workstation. Auto-generated SSL certificates

are self-signed and have an expiration date of seven years and one day and a start date of one day in the

past (for different time zone settings on management stations and the iDRAC).

The iDRAC Web server SSL certificate supports the asterisk character (*) as part of the left-most

component of the Common Name when generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). For example,

*.qa.com, or *.company.qa.com. This is called a wildcard certificate. If a wildcard CSR is generated

outside of iDRAC, you can have a signed single wildcard SSL certificate that you can upload for multiple

iDRACs and all the iDRACs are trusted by the supported browsers. While connecting to iDRAC Web

interface using a supported browser that supports a wildcard certificate, the iDRAC is trusted by the

browser. While launching viewers, the iDRACs are trusted by the viewer clients.