Hi there,
due to some selfish reasons I’m writing this post about how to renew the RapidSSL certificate. Obviously the process is a recurring one, but it does not happen that often that one could remember every step. So if there’s someone interested in how to renew an SSL certificate with the SSLMart, this may be of use, otherwise probably not so much.
Rapid SSL sent an early reminder about the expiration of the certificate per Email which was great, because one does not always keep on track of that kind of things if one’s work or life is not directly dependent on the server and its security. The renewal was a straight-forward process – one could log in to Paypal and carry out the payment. After that one was provided with the configuration page where to type in the required details such as the server information with certificate signing request which can be created as follows:
openssl req -out cert.csr -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout cert.key
The content of the created csr file is copied to the designated input field on the RapidSSL website (see the screenshot below). Additionally one has to provide the contact data of the owner of the certificate etc.
In the following step the certificate authority wants to verify that the request issuer has the required access to the server. There are multiple ways of achieving this, but I resorted to the recommend method of providing access to the mentioned file and make it available through HTTP (“HTTP File based authentication”). After having created the required file on the server it took only a couple of minutes before the actual certificate file was delivered per Email.
After that I simply copied the signed certificate to the server and configured Apache + Mod SSL to use it. Finally I verified on the browser that the certificate information had been updated to the created certificate.
That’s all for now – I hope this has been useful for someone (at least for me, when the procedure is needed for the next time). Until the next time! Bye!