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How to Generate CSR with Special Characters

When filling out the Create a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) form (in Settings → System → IPF Certificates), you can only use characters A-Za-z0-9.,/-_@%^:=+ in the following fields:

  • Organization name
  • Department
  • City
  • State / Province

This restriction is for security reasons.

Let’s consider an example where we enter Test Company with & (please note that the character & is not allowed) as the Organization name. After filling in the remaining fields, when we click Generate, an Invalid Input error will be displayed.

Generate a CSR - Invalid Input

If any special characters are required in any of the mentioned fields, you may use the following steps:

  1. Fill out the Create a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) form, but avoid any special characters (in our example, we replaced Test Company with & with Test Company with):

    Generate a CSR - with avoiding any special characters

  2. Click Generate.

    • In the browser, a file called nimpee.csr will be downloaded - please do not use this file.
    • The files customer.conf, customer.key, and customer.csr will be generated in the directory /opt/nimpee/conf.d/ssl-cust on the IP Fabric appliance. It’s important to note that customer.csr will be identical to nimpee.csr.

  3. Log in to the IP Fabric CLI as the osadmin user.

  4. Change to root:

    sudo su

  5. Change to the /opt/nimpee/conf.d/ssl-cust directory:

    cd /opt/nimpee/conf.d/ssl-cust

  6. Remove customer.key and customer.csr (will be re-generated in step 8):

    rm customer.key customer.csr

  7. Modify customer.conf (for example with vi customer.conf; in our example, we changed Test Company with to Test Company with &):

    Edit customer.conf file

  8. Generate new customer.key and customer.csr files using the modified customer.conf:

    openssl req -new -config customer.conf -keyout customer.key -out customer.csr

  9. Check the new customer.csr:

    openssl req -in customer.csr -noout -text

  10. Download the new customer.csr (for example with scp) for signing.

Once you have the signed SSL certificate ready, navigate to Settings → System → IPF Certificates and click Upload to begin the process of uploading the certificate.