How do I fully qualify my domain name?

Question

I'm attempting to add a SSL certificate from GoDaddy to my server and every time I generate CSR key and submit it to GoDaddy, I receive the following response: "You must use a fully-qualified domain name for a Premium Certificate Request."

What steps do I need to take to ensure my domain is full qualified? Could it also be an issue with the way my server is configured?

Answer 1

Probably you give the wrong data into the process of the CSR-generation. The FQDN of the Domain you want to protect needs to be filled in the CN-Field.

Assuming that you use linux and openssl and the domain you wanna get an SSL-Cert for is "www.mycooldomain.com" (SSL-Cert with www.):

$ openssl req -new -nodes -keyout mycooldomain_com.key -out mycooldomain_com.csr -newkey rsa:2048

Then you hit enter and have to fillout the required fields:

Generating a 2048 bit RSA private key
....++++.....
writing new private key to 'mycooldomain_com.key'
-----
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:CH
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:Bern
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Bern
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Your Name / Company
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:www.mycooldomain.com
Email Address []:info@mycooldomain.com

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

Country for me is CH, my State is Bern, City Bern too, the name of You or your Company, Section is empty for me and then as Common Name, the FQDN you wanna protect.

Answer 2

A fully qualified domain name means the full domain name. For example if you were to submit a request for serverfault the Fully Qualified Domain Name would be "serverfault.com". It simply means the full name. If you were talking about a particular server in a domain, the FQDN would be the server name plus the domain. For example Srv1.subdomain.domain.com, or Srv1.domain.local.

What is the name you are attempting to use?

Answer 3

Put a period after it. Without a period, it can be interpreted as a local hostname.

example.com -> example.com.

Answer 4

Nothing special. Let's say your domain is example.com then everything NOT example.com is a full-qualified domain name. For example www.example.com or something.example.com is one.

Answer 5

You don't need to qualify your domain name. You need to use your fully qualified domain name. That means, you need to use the full DNS address that includes hostname, any subdomains (if their are any), domain name, and tld followed by a period. Something like this:

host.domain.com.

host would be the hostname, domain would be the domain name, and com would be the tld.

For more information, try checking out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_qualified_domain_name