Creating an AD certificate for NetScaler 10.5

This post is based on a post by someone else that I found while I had to do this today. I wanted to configure NetScaler 10.5 with Citrix Storefront 3.9 and found that post useful, but some of the screenshots were different in my case – so thought I’d write it down for my future self. This post is going to be less on writing and more of screenshots as I am feeling very lazy.

So without much further ado –

Login to the NetScaler and create an RSA Key

1-2-3 as below.

Fill in the following fields and click “Create”.

The file name and extension doesn’t matter but we will refer to it later.

Create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on the NetScaler

Again, the request file name does not matter. The key filename & password is same as what we used earlier. There’s few more fields to fill – obvious ones like the organization name etc, the mandatory ones have an asterisk – then click “Create”.

Open the CSR

Click the link to view. Then click the link to “save text to a file”.

Login to your AD Certification Authority and submit the request

I am going to use the command line as the CSR doesn’t contain info on what template the CA should use, and that gives an error on the GUI: “0x80094801 – the request contains no certificate template information”.

Using the command line is simple. Open the command prompt and type the following:

This will prompt you for the location of the CSR and also the CA to use etc.

If you get any error about missing templates here, it’s possible you haven’t added the “Web Server” template to your CA templates. You can via this menu –

The command will also prompt for a location to save the generated certificate at. Save it someplace, then go back to the NetScaler.

Login to the NetScaler and install this certificate

Click the Install button as above. Then fill in the details as below. The certificate-key pair name does not matter. The certificate file name is chosen by clicking on “Browse”, then “Local”, and selecting the certificate file that you previously saved. The key file name and password are same as what you typed in the initial screenshot.

Finally, click “Install”.

That’s it! The NetScaler now has a certificate issued by the AD CA.