Re: Digital Certificate Expiration

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug,

I wrote a command called CHKCERT that you can run to check when a 
certificate will be expired.  For example, you might do this:

     CHKCERT HOST(www.klements.com) PORT(443) DAYS(7)

It will connect to www.klements.com and check that the SSL certificate 
will be good for at least 7 more days.  If not, it'll send back an *ESCAPE 
message.

That means you can write a CL program that runs this command and do 
something like this:

PGM

   CHKCERT    HOST(www.klements.com) PORT(443) DAYS(7)
   MONMSG CPF0000 EXEC(DO)
       SNDMSG MSG('WWW.KLEMENTS.COM:443 WILL BE EXPIRED!') +
              TOUSR(KLEMSCOT)
   ENDDO

ENDDO

(You could change the SNDMSG to SNDDST if you prefer to send e-mail, etc.)
Then you could configure your job scheduler to run that program every 
morning (for example) so that you'd have a week's notice if a certificate 
is going to expire.  If you forgot to replace it, you'd get another 
message the next day, etc.

This CHKCERT tool was written for an article entitled "How to Check if SSL 
Certificates Are Expired" that I published in the Club Tech iSeries 
Programming Tips newsletter.  If you have a Pro subscription to 
iSeriesNetwork.com, you can read the article and download the tool from 
the following link:
http://www.iseriesnetwork.com/article.cfm?id=51386

---
Scott Klement  http://www.scottklement.com


On Tue, 2 May 2006, Hart, Doug - ETG (Contractor) wrote:

> How are people managing digital certificate expirations?
>
> We are setting up SSL for our MQ queues.  This is for different iSeries
> partitions in different datacenters and some PC servers.  The default
> when creating DCs is that they expire in one year.  I'm assuming that
> when I renew my certificates that I'll need to export them back out to
> the other systems.  This is about a 2 hours process.
>
> Other than setting a reminder in my calendar for next year I see no way
> to remember this.  I see no way the iSeries will remind me other than
> the application failing.   Heck, I might not even be involved with this
> next year.
>
> --
> Doug Hart