Users Guide

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.
Generating a new certificate signing request
A CSR is a digital request to a Certificate Authority (CA) for a SSL server certificate. SSL server certificates allow clients of the
server to trust the identity of the server and to negotiate an encrypted session with the server.
After the CA receives a CSR, they review and verify the information the CSR contains. If the applicant meets the CA’s
security standards, the CA issues a digitally-signed SSL server certificate that uniquely identifies the applicant’s server when it
establishes SSL connections with browsers running on management stations.
After the CA approves the CSR and issues the SSL server certificate, it can be uploaded to iDRAC. The information used to
generate the CSR, stored on the iDRAC firmware, must match the information contained in the SSL server certificate, that is,
the certificate must have been generated using the CSR created by iDRAC.
Generating CSR using web interface
To generate a new CSR:
NOTE:
Each new CSR overwrites any previous CSR data stored in the firmware. The information in the CSR must match
the information in the SSL server certificate. Else, iDRAC does not accept the certificate.
1. In the iDRAC Web interface, go to iDRAC Settings > Services > Web Server > SSL certificate, select Generate
Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and click Next.
The Generate a New Certificate Signing Request page is displayed.
2. Enter a value for each CSR attribute.
For more information, see iDRAC Online Help.
3. Click Generate.
A new CSR is generated. Save it to the management station.
Generating CSR using RACADM
To generate a CSR using RACADM, use the set command with the objects in the iDRAC.Security group, and then use the
sslcsrgen command to generate the CSR.
For more information, see the iDRAC RACADM CLI Guide available at https://www.dell.com/idracmanuals.
108
Configuring iDRAC