Certificates, Subject Alternative Names, etc.

I had encountered this in my testlab but never bothered much coz it was just my testlab after all. But now I am dabbling with certificates at work and hit upon the same issue. 

The issue is that if I create a certificate for mymachine.fqdn but I visit the machine at just mymachine, then I get an error. So how can I tell the certificate that the shorter name (and any other aliases I may have) are also valid? Turns out you need to use the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) field for that!

You can’t add a SAN field to an existing certificate. Got to create a new one. In my case I had simply requested a domain certificate from my IIS server and that doesn’t give any option to specify the SAN.

Instructions for creating a new certificate with SAN field are here and here. The latter has screenshots, so check that out first. In my case, at the step where I select “Web Server” I wasn’t getting “Web Server” as an option. I was only getting “Computer”. Looking into this, I realized it’s coz of the permissions difference. The “Web Server” template only has Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins in its ACLs, while the “Computer” template had Domain Computers too with “Enrol” rights. The fix is simple – go the Manage Templates and change the ACL of “Web Server” accordingly. (You could also use ADSI Edit and edit the ACL in the Configuration section).