Verisign SSL and Plesk Woes...Can anyone help?

[chuck.boyer]

I just talked with Verisign. They are telling me that IIS requires the Intermediate Certificate and the public key be combined; this is why they issue a combined certificate. I'm confused by this because other certificate vendors like GoDaddy do not issue combined certificates. Maybe it is an ease of installation issue when installing directly to IIS?

Anyway, they are recommending that when a certificate is requested, our customers request an Apache certificate. This makes sense to you and me since we know what the system is running. But to our clients it will be confusing when we tell them:

1. Our servers run on Windows and IIS
2. Depending on where you buy your certificate, do one of the following:
   
   a. If you buy your certificate from GoDaddy or other vendors that do not combine the intermediate certificate and the public key, choose MS IIS as your server because it doesn't matter since they don't combine the two.
   
   b. If you buy your certificate from Verisign choose Apache as your server
   
   [/list=1]
   
   Plesk support is recommending the use of the openssl tools, but I don't know in what format Verisign has issued the certificate. When I save their certificate to my desktop as a cer and try to open it, Windows says the certificate is not in a valid format. Does anyone know what that format is?
   
   Has anyone else run into this issue? I can't imagine I'm the only Plesk user that has. How have you worked around it?
   
   Thanks.

 

[JackL]

I think this will help:
http://verisign.com/support/ssl-certificates-support/index.html

John S.G.