Infrastructure Domain SSL certificate

Infrastructure Domain SSL certificate#

This section contains guidelines to enforce security on a typical Carbonio installation.

Deploy a Commercial SSL Certificate#

In this section we explain how to add an SSL/TLS certificate to a Carbonio installation. Carbonio supports the installation and management of Let’s Encrypt certificates: you can find directions for that in Carbonio Admin Panel, please refer to the dedicated article.

This setup is mandatory if Carbonio is used in conjunction with mobile apps; it is also suggested for any installation in order to avoid the client browser’s warning about an invalid certificate upon connection.

To learn more about infrastructure, wildcard, and domain certificates and understand which one you need, please refer to Section Virtual Hosts & Domain Certificates.

See also

You can manage SSL domain certificates from the Carbonio Admin Panel: check out Section Virtual Hosts & Domain Certificates.

Commercial Certificate Installation#

We will describe the procedure by taking into account the following scenario:

  • The server FQDN is mail.example.com

  • No SSL certificate is available for the domain (no existing and usable wildcard-type certificate)

In the remainder, replace mail.example.com with your actual server FQDN.

The procedure consists of a few steps and requires console access to the Carbonio server.

Note

If you already have the certificate, you can skip Steps 1. and 2. and go immediately to Step 3 below.

Step 1. Certificate Signing Request generation

If you do not have a certificate yet, and you have to request a new one, you need to generate a CSR. You need first to decide whether you need a normal or wildcard certificate, then use either of these commands, providing suitable values according to your organisation.

Normal certificate
# /opt/zextras/bin/zmcertmgr createcsr comm -new -subject \
"/C=IT/ST=VR/L=Yourtown/O=YourCompany/OU=SampleDepartment/CN=mail.example.com" \
-subjectAltNames mail.example.com

Note

You can optionally include more than one (alternative) name by simply adding to the end of the command one ore more -subjectAltNames options, followed by the name to add.

Wildcard certificate
# /opt/zextras/bin/zmcertmgr createcsr comm -new -subject \
"/C=IT/ST=VR/L=Yourtown/O=YourCompany/OU=SampleDepartment/CN=*.example.com"

In the above commands, the various elements in the -subject are the standard fields of an SSL certificate:

  • C: the 2-digit country code

  • ST: State or Province

  • L: City

  • O: Organization Name

  • OU: Organization Unit (Department)

  • CN: Common Name

Once the command is executed these files will be generated:

# /opt/zextras/ssl/carbonio/commercial/commercial.key
# /opt/zextras/ssl/carbonio/commercial/commercial.csr

Step 2. Get the certificates from your SSL provider

To complete this step successfully, you need to submit the CSR to the SSL provider, get a commercial certificate in PEM format, and save it as commercial.crt.

Moreover, SSL providers supply also the intermediate certificate and the so-called Root CA in a bundled certificate file (“Full Chain CA”), that must be saved as commercial_ca.crt.

Step 3. Verification and deploy

Issue the following commands to verify that the certificate and your private key match:

  • become the zextras user

    # su - zextras

  • upload the certificates received from the Authority to the /tmp directory

  • verify the certificates

    zextras$ cd /tmp
zextras$ zmcertmgr verifycrt comm /opt/zextras/ssl/carbonio/commercial/commercial.key commercial.crt commercial_ca.crt

If the verification is successful, you can deploy the SSL certificate.

# zmcertmgr deploycrt comm commercial.crt commercial_ca.crt

Finally, restart Carbonio.

# zmcontrol restart

Your certificate should now be installed: verify the certificate details by running this command:

# zmcertmgr viewdeployedcrt
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