• Our team is looking to connect with folks who use email services provided by Plesk, or a premium service. If you'd like to be part of the discovery process and share your experiences, we invite you to complete this short screening survey. If your responses match the persona we are looking for, you'll receive a link to schedule a call at your convenience. We look forward to hearing from you!
  • The BIND DNS server has already been deprecated and removed from Plesk for Windows.
    If a Plesk for Windows server is still using BIND, the upgrade to Plesk Obsidian 18.0.70 will be unavailable until the administrator switches the DNS server to Microsoft DNS. We strongly recommend transitioning to Microsoft DNS within the next 6 weeks, before the Plesk 18.0.70 release.
  • The Horde component is removed from Plesk Installer. We recommend switching to another webmail software supported in Plesk.

SSL installation problem

J

Joelee

Guest
Hi I have just bought a SSL certificate from RapidSSL. When I was installing it from control panel of Plesk, it has below problem:

unable to set the private key: probably the private key format is invalid.

Is the private key the one I used to create the csr file please?

Any response would be highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.
 
Hi I have found the solution: the problem relates to my private key being encrypted with a passphrase.
 
Solution for this

It took me a long time to find the solution to this problem, and here it is for anyone else who comes upon it.

Rather than having to generate a key with Plesk and order another SSL, you can do the following:

1) Remove the encrypted password from the key:

Remove the encryption from the RSA private key (while keeping a backup copy of the original file):

$ cp server.key server.key.org
$ openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key

Make sure the server.key file is only readable by root:

$ chmod 400 server.key

Then just import in to Plesk! I found these directions at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/ssl/ssl_faq.html#removepassphrase for reference.

Or, if you really want the encrypted password, then you can copy the https section out of the httpd.include in /conf for your virtual host. Then disable SSL for the domain, and create a new file: /etc/httpd/conf/yourdomain.conf and paste in the info you copied before. Cut out everything except what is between <ifmodule mod_ssl> and </ifmodule> (should be quite large).

Change the key to point to wherever you put the key and cert (usually /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key and ssl.crt). Then in httpd.conf (before the line: include /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.include) put in: include /etc/httpd/conf/yourvhost.conf.

Reboot Apache and it will prompt you for your security password!

I really dislike the latter way of doing it, as it is quite messy, but it is indeed more secure if you require it.

You will have to change the paths I included here to match your distro of course!

Jordan
 
Back
Top