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Sorry for the newbie question, but I am having trouble trying to install an SSL onto an IIS server. When I purchased my certificate, the provider gave me 3 text files. The files contain the following:

  • the RSA key,
  • the certificate contents
  • and a CA Bundle

How would I go about installing the SSL onto my IIS server. I have read around and it seems that I need a .cer or .crt file - however I am not sure on how to generate these files with the three text files that were given to me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Your vendor gave you instructions for installing the certificate. Please try following them first. Jun 24, 2013 at 2:21
  • @Michael - Well no, that is why I am resorting to asking on serverfault - I have already contacted my vendor, and they only have instructions to install in Apache not IIS.
    – skub
    Jun 24, 2013 at 2:26
  • @Jacob thanks for the insightful comment /end-sarcasm. Anyway I got it working with Falcons answer. Cheers.
    – skub
    Jun 24, 2013 at 2:46

1 Answer 1

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I suspect by CA bundle your CA means the intermediate and root certificates which establist the chain of trust for your certificate.

Typically, these will be provided as base64-encoded data, with delimiters like the following:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----

If this is the case, the data is already in PEM format, which is the typical format of .cer and .crt files. You can simply rename them and you will have certificates.

Windows tends to have trouble with certificate keypairs that aren't in PFX format (linux has no such trouble), so you might need to look into using openssl to convert them before you can install the certificate. Then, simply use the certificate manager MMC snapin, import the certificate with the key to the machine certificate store (it will be a "personal" certificate, which is merely an unfortunate nomenclature from Microsoft), and select it as the certificate to use in IIS (the option is somewhere under the SSL options in the server manager snapin).

Any decent CA will be able to help you with this in great detail and provide the screenshots and detailed a priori walkthrough you're probably looking for.

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