Making a new self-signed certificate

To generate a root certificate, start the gencert utility from a command prompt using the –r option. The utility prompts you to enter the identity information, the certificate password and expiry date, and the names of the new certificate files.

In the following procedure, you are prompted for names for the certificate, private key, and server identity files. Sybase IQ accepts any name and extension for these files. However, Windows only recognizes .crt and .cer extensions as certificate files.

In the following procedure, an RSA certificate is generated.

>gencert -r Certificate Generation Tool Choose certificate type ((R)SA or (E)CC): R Enter key length (512-2048): 2048 Generating key pair... Country: CA State/Province: Ontario Locality: Waterloo Organization: Sybase, Inc. Organizational Unit: IAS Common Name: MobiLink Serial Number: 2003.07.29.01 Certificate valid for how many years: 2 Enter password to protect private key: password Enter file path to save certificate: self.crt Enter file path to save private key: self.pri Enter file path to save server identity: serv1.crt

The response to each question should be a string, except for the number of years to the expiry date, which must be an integer.

The utility creates three files, which in this example are called self.crt, self.pri, and serv1.crt.

The server certificate contains the information in the public and private certificate files. You can make a server certificate by concatenating a public certificate and the file containing the private key.