Topic: Problems creating a self signed certificate

[ebohatch]

I have tried to follow the various directions on creating a SSL certificate but keep running into walls.
Now whenever I run CA.pl -newreq ( or even openssl -new -------) I get a statement:
Loading 'screen' into random state -
Then the CPU goes to 100% usage and it never seems to return (let it run for 20 minutes??).
I have to cancel it to get out.

I am running:
Apache/2.2.3 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8d PHP/5.1.6 mod_perl/2.0.3-rc1 Perl/v5.8.8

on a Xp Pro with Sp2.

[tdonovan]

Ouch! That may be hard to diagnose.

OpenSSL collects random data (i.e. entropy) by probing a lot of memory addresses and some info from the display on Windows. It looks like one of these hangs on your system. Possibly hardware-related. It doesn't hang for me on Windows XP sp2.

You could try moving a few windows around while it is hung, a couple of mouse-clicks, etc. to see if that frees things up. Somehow, I doubt that will work.

If you really want to dig into it - I put a test program in http://www.tomdonovan.net/download/screentest.zip.

This has two files: screentest.exe and screentest.c (the source code).
You need to put screentest.exe in the same directory with a libeay32.dll file and run it. It should be OpenSSL version 0.9.8d.
Your Apache bin directorywould work, or you can copy both screentest.exe and libeay32.dll to a test directory and run it there.
screentest.exe will print out a lot of line numbers as it runs. These are the line numbers from the source code.
You can look in the source code to see how far it gets.

This might give you a clue about what which step is hanging on your system.

-tom-

[pnllan]

I don't know what you used an online guide, but here are a couple of good links for use on Windows:

Pre-compiled Open-SSL for Win32 from Shining Light Productions

Apache + SSL Win32 SEE SECTION 3 for CREATING A SELF-SIGNED CERTIFICATE

Hope this helps...Good Luck