I issue a lot of certificates from our internal company certificate authority – they’re free, and since I can publish trusted root signers out to the domain, they’re trusted to anyone who would be using the site. You can type pseudo-random values into your request and my CA will issue a certificate for you.
Today, though, I needed a certificate for a site that would be used by non-employees. People who are not subject to my domain GPO. People who do not trust my CA. So I did what everyone else does – got a real certificate 🙂
I generated my CSR (and actually typed in good data – my server is in Conway, AR, USA type location instead of Z or A). Went out to Verisign’s site … “The CSR contains an invalid state. Please click your browser’s Back button and enter a new CSR.”
Thought the CSR might have gotten corrupted somehow, so I tried again. Same result. Tried some different information – same result. Finally resorted to reading the instructions – locality names may not contain abbreviations. D’oh. State like organized political community not state like condition.
