Preexisting Certifcate Installation for Zimbra 6.0

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This article applies to the following ZCS versions.

ZCS 6.0 Article ZCS 6.0

Zimbra makes it extremely easy to install either a self-signed certificate or a commercial certificate specific to the Zimbra server. If, on the other hand, you want to install a certificate you created somewhere else (such as a wildcard certificate for your domain) the procedure is a bit more involved.

First thing is to make sure that the file commercial_ca.crt contains all necessary CA Certs for a valid CA chain. With a COMODO Multi Domain Certificate you receive two CA certs: AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt and UTNAddTrustServerCA.crt This may apply to other commercial CAs too. Now we put the Certs in the appropriate file

cat AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt >> ca_bundle.crt
cat UTNAddTrustServerCA.crt >> ca_bundle.crt

Become root, make a directory to work in and bring the files over. There are lots of ways to do this; I used scp:

mkdir /root/certs
cd /root/certs
scp user@otherserver.domain.com:domain.com.crt .
scp user@otherserver.domain.com:domain.com.key .
scp user@otherserver.domain.com:ca_bundle.crt .

Now you need to rename the files to what Zimbra expects:

mv /root/certs/domain.com.crt /root/certs/commercial.crt
mv /root/certs/domain.com.key /root/certs/commercial.key
mv /root/certs/ca_bundle.crt /root/certs/commercial_ca.crt

Next you put the key file in two places where Zimbra expects it:

cp /root/certs/commercial.key /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra
cp /root/certs/commercial.crt /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra
cp /root/certs/commercial_ca.crt /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra
mv /root/certs/commercial.key /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial

Then you use Zimbra's fancy certificate importer tools. First we check if we really have a matching pair of .key and .crt files:

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr verifycrt comm /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial.key commercial.crt commercial_ca.crt

If you see something like

** Verifying commercial.crt against /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial.key
Certificate (commercial.crt) and private key (/opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial.key) match.
Valid Certificate: commercial.crt: OK

everything is O.K. Now we need to deploy the cert:

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr deploycrt comm commercial.crt commercial_ca.crt

The response should be something like

** Verifying commercial.crt against /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial.key
Certificate (commercial.crt) and private key (/opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial.key) match.
Valid Certificate: commercial.crt: OK
** Copying commercial.crt to /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial.crt
** Appending ca chain commercial_ca.crt to /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial.crt
** Importing certificate /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/commercial/commercial_ca.crt to CACERTS as zcs-user-commercial_ca...done.
** NOTE: mailboxd must be restarted in order to use the imported certificate.
** Saving server config key zimbraSSLCertificate...done.
** Saving server config key zimbraSSLPrivateKey...done.
** Installing mta certificate and key...done.
** Installing slapd certificate and key...done.
** Installing proxy certificate and key...done.
** Creating pkcs12 file /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra/jetty.pkcs12...done.
** Creating keystore file /opt/zimbra/mailboxd/etc/keystore...done.
** Installing CA to /opt/zimbra/conf/ca...done.

Finally we need the new cert to be deployed on jetty. Note that the last command spans two lines... either use the backslash as indicated, or paste both lines into one command, leaving the backslash out. Also, the password really is "changeit" ... don't be like me and screw around forever trying to figure out what to change it to.

/opt/zimbra/java/bin/keytool -import -alias root -keystore \
/opt/zimbra/java/jre/lib/security/cacerts -storepass changeit -file /opt/zimbra/conf/ca/commercial_ca.pem

In most cases (if you redeploy a cert with the same .csr for a new time period) you will get:

Certificate already exists in keystore under alias <zcs-user-commercial_ca>
Do you still want to add it? [no]:  yes
Certificate was added to keystore

Last but not least restart Zimbra:

/etc/init.d/zimbra restart

Now we're done. To check if everything is working like expected you can verify the new cert in the Zimbra Admin GUI.

Verified Against: ZCS 6.0.x Date Created: 10/26/2010
Article ID: https://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Preexisting_Certifcate_Installation_for_Zimbra_6.0 Date Modified: 2010-11-19



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