Chapter 6.
63
RA: Requesting and Receiving
Certificates Locally
The Registration Authority (RA) subsystem allows certificates to be requested and approved
locally
. Locally can encompass any kind of division: different departments, geographical locations,
or employee types. The purpose of a Registration Manager is to bring the approval process for
certificates to a grassroots level, where people who actually know or are responsible for a requester
are capable of assessing their certificate requests.
Using a Registration Manager relieves the load on centralized CAs.
The RAs have more limited options than CAs, concentrating on certificates for users, servers, and
routers. The requests are approved by the RA agent and are then issued by the CA.
6.1. Listing Certificate Requests
Listing requests initially returns all certificate requests submitted or generated through the RA
instance. These can be filtered by their status (open, approved, rejected, or failed).
NOTE
Open requests have not yet been processed by an RA agent, while rejected requests
were rejected by the RA agent. Approved and failed both mean that the initial request
was approved by the RA agent, and have been processed by the CA, one successfully
(approved) and one unsuccessfully (failed).
1. Open the RA agent services page.
https://server.example.com:12889/agent/index.cgi
2. Click the
List Requests
link.
3. All of the requests which have been submitted or generated through the RA are listed.
