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Steve
Asked: 2010-03-27 07:32:03 +0800 CST

Windows 7, IIS 7.5, Selfssl

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The windows iis6 resource kit won't install on Windows 7 (Home Premium) so I copied it from another machine and selfssl.exe is giving me:

Failed to generate the cryptographic key: 0x5

I tried the instructions here but am still getting the above error.

I'm trying to set the common name of the certificate to a name other than the machine name so I can avoid the certificate errors in the browser. This is a test web application. I know I can just test with the browser errors, but I'd like to mimic real world conditions as much as possible.

Is there any other way to generate your own ssl certificates for iis7.5 and set the common name yourself?

iis-7 windows-7 ssl-certificate

3 Answers

  1. I'm trying to set the common name of the certificate to a name other than the machine name so I can avoid the certificate errors in the browser.

    To my knowledge, unless you install the cert into the root store of each machine that visits, you'll continue to get those cert errors (at least initially) because they aren't from a trusted root source. There's really no way around that with self-signed certs.

    As for creating the self-signed certs, you can do that right in IIS manager. Open IIS Manager, click on Server certificate, select the create self signed certification action link.

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  2. You can get a free cert from http://www.startssl.com/ for your site. With self-signed certs, you will always get a warning unless it is in the trusted root certificate store as GregD pointed out. There is no other way to verify a self-signed cert.

    In a sense, all CA roots are self-signed certificates your machine trusts, but they also have the ability to sign other certs, so that is how certificate chains work.

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  3. It is possible to create Self-Signed Certificate... directly from IIS 7.5 MMC. You will need to open IIS MMC -> click on the Machine Name (e.g. SERVER2) and in the Features View you will see Server Certificates -> double click and it will open Server Certificates -> on the right hand side under Actions click on Create Self-Signed Certificates. Check this out

    alt text
    (source: dotnetscraps.com)

    alt text
    (source: dotnetscraps.com)

    Ignore the marking's as it was used for some other purpose ;-)

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