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Purpose

This article provides the steps required in order to provide your own certifications to your SoftNAS instance.

Symptoms

An SSL certificate is necessary for more than just distributing the public key

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.  If it is signed by a trusted third-party, it verifies the identity of the server so clients know they aren’t sending their information (encrypted or not) to the wrong person.

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Info
titleWhat is a Self-Signed Certificate?
It is a certificate that is signed by itself rather than a trusted third party. This is not a good idea for most

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business use cases. You will almost never want to use a self-signed certificate on a public Apache server that requires anonymous visitors to connect to your site because they could easily become a victim of a man-in-the-middle attack.

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Info
titleWhen could a Self-Signed Certificate prove adequate?
  •  Apache development server - There is no need to spend extra

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  • money buying a trusted certificate when you are just developing or testing an application.

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  •  Intranet - When clients only have to go through a local

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  • Intranet to get to the server, there is virtually no chance of a man-in-the-middle attack.

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  •  Personal sites with few visitors

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  • - If you have a small personal site that transfers non-critical information, there is very little incentive for someone to attack the connection.


Info
titleFinal Take

In other words, when deploying your SoftNAS server into an enterprise use case, it may be required (or at least strongly recommended) that you switch the default self-signed certifications for your own enterprise certifications.

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This article provides the steps required in order to provide your own certifications to your SoftNAS instance.


Resolution

If you want to send or receive messages signed by root authorities and these authorities are not installed on the server, you must add a trusted root certificate manually.

Use the following steps to add or remove trusted root certificates to/from a server:

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  •  

    Append your trusted certificate, and set the desired path

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  • using the following commands:

    Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    cp new.crt /etc/pki/tls/certs

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  • 
    cp new.key /etc/pki/tls/private/ca.key

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  • 
    cp new.csr /etc/pki/tls/private/ca.csr

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    Restart the service using the following command:

    Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    service httpd restart


We now need to set up the Virtual Hosts to display the new certificate.

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    Open

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  • the SSL

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  • Configuration file using the following command:

    Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    vi +/

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  • <SSL-Certificate-File> /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf


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    Change the paths to match where the

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  • key file is stored.

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  •  If you

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  • used the method above, it will be:

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  • Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    <SSL-Certificate-File> /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca

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  • /crt


  •  

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  • Set the correct path for the Certificate Key

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  • file below.

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  •  If you

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  • used the

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  • method above, it

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  • will be:

    Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    <SSL-Certificate-Key-File> /etc/pki/tls/private/ca.key


  •  Save and Quit

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  • the file

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Execute the following command on both the target and source node and erase the ssh finger prints:

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  • .

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    Restart Apache using the following command:

    Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    service httpd restart


Additional Info

Warning
It is HIGHLY recommended to add the certificates before configuring replication to avoid any SnapReplicate™ interruption, as changing the keys will deactivate replication.

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Change Keys after Configuring SnapReplicate™

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    Erase the SSH fingerprints by using the following command:

    Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    sed -I '/<OTHER-NODE-IP-

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  • ADDRESS>/d' .ssh/known_hosts

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    Add a new set of fingerprints

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  • by using the following command:

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  • Code Block
    languagebash
    themeEclipse
    ssh-keyscan

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  •  <OTHER-NODE-IP-

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  • ADDRESS> >> .ssh/known_hosts


  •  Log into the SoftNAS Web UI (StorageCenter) on both instances and try to activate HA again.

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Info

If you continue to experience issues, please contact Buurst Support for further assistance.