This document is intended to walk-through the steps I took to successfully implement a free SSL certificate for use with WebVPN on a Cisco IOS Router.

I had tried a couple of times to use StartSSL certificates but fell at different hurdles.   However, this time I crossed the line.
The credit for this success goes 100% to a member on the StartSSL forum, dlambert – he documented his steps and I merely followed them!  This post is as much for my own reference, and if it helps someone else along – great!
Dlambert’s original post can be found at https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?p=6568&sid=1750512d3d6a4bbcc95dcd3cd94d228b#p6568

1. Generate RSA Key-pair for use with Certificates

RTR(config)#crypto key generate rsa general-keys label RSA.StartSSL-vpn modulus 2048 exportable

RTR(config)#crypto key export rsa RSA.StartSSL-vpn pem terminal 3des <password>

This will display the RSA keys to the screen.
Copy and Paste these into a text file on your computer.  Save the section containing the private key to a file called private.key
For example:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Proc-Type: 4,ENCRYPTED
DEK-Info: DES-EDE3-CBC,E3568BE1DF325CB8

lxkgHIrPBaX4QNJo7EN1QzAvB+iz7A+UXNlwJvyB2Moy7UhGXdq5ss3sQUVXdbem
nA56jYUnLKOjPUHjPfeMEa2zHdTCS5P9HFu6VjXgn1gc9tTtTsVXrVy/nQYJbTBv
.......
6m5N37apbOAypLZTKx6BekHsE4TfDv2FHJsbNwJxtVlBLwS5j0TlN8j0vZh4y6TK
gVpKU1kMbOpBtzVHoT5LCBPCXOPak1jqg66xpU0ztlD6Vy2Vtx1mhcUZXGfXo7P7
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

2. Create a template file for the Certificate Signing Request.

Save the following code snippet and save it as 2048.cpl

#################################################
[ req ]
default_bits    = 2048
distinguished_name   = dn

[ dn ]
countryName    = Country
stateOrProvinceName    = State
localityName    = City
0.organizationName    = Company
organizationalUnitName    = Department
commonName    = FQDN
emailAddress    = Email
#################################################

3. For the next step, you need to have Openssl binaries on your local PC to be able to prepare the CSR in the correct format that StartSSL are expecting.  Visit www.openssl.org for details on how to do this, for your respective Operating System.

openssl req -new -sha1 -key private.key -out server.csr -config 2048.cpl

4.  Head over to the StartSSL website to generate the Certificate, based on the CSR you just created.

Follow the Wizard to generate a Web/Server SSL/TLS certificate.
On the screen titled, Generate Private Key – click the Skip button, as you have already generated your keys on the Router.

Copy and Paste the contents of the server.csr file you generated (including header lines)   into the Submit Certificate Request box.

Save the resulting certificate text into a file name of your choice.

Also, while on the certificate screen of StartCom, save the CA Certificate, and the Intermediate CA Certificates  (Right-click save-as)

5.  Create a Trustpoint on the router to hold the CA Certificate

RTR(config)#crypto pki trustpoint StartSSL-CA-Trustpoint
RTR(config)enrollment terminal pem
RTR(config)revocation-check none

RTR(config)crypto pki authenticate StartSSL-CA-Trustpoint

At this point, paste in the contents of the ca.pem (CA certificate file you downloaded earlier.
Finish with quit on a line on it’s own.

6.  Similar to step 5, but this time creating a Trustpoint that will hold the Intermediate CA, and linked to the RSA keys generated in Step 1.

RTR(config)#crypto pki trustpoint StartSSL-Inter-Cert-Trustpoint
RTR(config)#enrollment terminal pem
RTR(config)#usage ssl-server
RTR(config)#serial-number none
RTR(config)#fqdn vpn.domain.com
RTR(config)#ip-address none
RTR(config)#revocation-check crl
RTR(config)#rsakeypair RSA.StartSSL-vpn

RTR(config)#crypto pki authenticate StartSSL-Inter-Cert-Trustpoint

Paste in the contents of the  sub.class1.server.ca.pem Intermediate CA file.

7.  Now you can import your actual certificate, and it should be tied correctly to all the components.

crypto pki import StartSSL-Inter-Cert-Trustpoint certificate

Paste the contents of your certificate file you saved earlier.
Again, finishing with quit on a single line on it’s own.

If successful, you should see a good-looking message below!

% Router Certificate successfully imported

You can now configure your Webvpn context to refer to the 2nd Trustpoint you created, that contains your certificate.

 

Hope this helps!

I’ve been banging my head against a brick wall recently with what should be a straightforward task.

I look after an SBS 2008 install and we are preparing to rationalise the email setup in the very near future by using Exchange 2007 that comes as part of SBS 2008

In preparation for that switchover I needed to create a shared mailbox for the “Admin” team. However, in SBS2008/Ex2k7 you can’t create a shared mailbox through the GUI’s, it can only be done by the Exchange Management shell (aka Powershell).

Not too much trouble I thought as I found a Powershell example, so I prepared my command:

New-Mailbox -Name:'Admin' -OrganizationalUnit:'lbc.local/Exchange resources' -Database:'Mailbox Database' -UserPrincipalName:'[email protected]' -Shared

But, this command kept failing: New-Mailbox : Active Directory operation failed on LBCSRV1.lbc.local. This error is not retriable. Additional information: Access is denied.

Active directory response: 00000005: SecErr: DSID-03152492, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0At line:1 char:12+ New-Mailbox

I was using the SBS / Exchange administrator account, and doing this command on the server itself. After some searching I found a few posts that were experiencing the same problem but no real solutions.

Then it hit me! I tried opening the Exchange Management Shell as Administrator (right-click – Run As Administrator) ….ran the command again and hey-presto…..one shared mailbox created!!! Woooohooo!!

“I will tame SBS…I will tame SBS” 🙂

Two previous comments I received when my site was running Drupal:

Sabelo (not verified) – Tue, 17/08/2010 – 10:55

Thanks for your post it has saved me!! I have been battling with this error for solong and it never occured to me to do such a simple yet very important task. Thanks a lot once again.

David (not verified) – Wed, 02/05/2012 – 16:07

Legend, thanks for this. First result in Google and it fixed it.

I recently ran into issues with a Windows Sharepoint 2010 environment that is load-balanced by Cisco ACE modules. 

I’m no Sharepoint expert so if I get the WSS terminology slightly wrong – you’ll know why!

Basically the issues presented themselves in the following ways:

1. A Sharepoint site had some sort of webpart that enabled “live” view of Excel spreadsheets within the browser.

When you first visited the page, everything was fine and the spreadsheet loaded successfully, however upon navigating away to a different page, any subsequent requests were either met with a browser dialog box stating that an error occurred finding the file, or an HTTP 503 Gateway error.

2. Miscellaneous authentication issues (HTTP 401 Unauthorised)

From an networking perspective, this was occurring across a number of resilient pairs of ACE’s.  All were set for session persistency using a named cookie that was inserted by the ACE.

Nothing unusual so far!

Where it got interesting was when doing some packet captures, and Fiddler HTTP traces.

In these I could see that the cookie the ACE was insterting was present within the browser session, and an additional cookie set by WSS for keeping the session authenticated.  I also noticed that were two other entries in the cookie, that to me, looked like random characters, but I concluded that these were inserted by the WSS server.

After some investigation, I determined that the HTTP header was larger than 4096 bytes – the extra entries that WSS was added were around 3400 bytes each (there were two! ).

It transpires that there is a default number of bytes that the ACE checks for a cookie in the HTTP header is 4096 bytes. If a cookie, HTTP header, or URL exceed this 4096 value, the ACE drops the packet and sends a RST to the client.

The solution for our environment was to increase this value to overcome the large HTTP header size containing the WSS inserted data.

Changes needed on the ACE:

parameter-map type http HTTP_MAP_HEADER_LENGTH
set header-maxparse-length 16384

This defines a greater value. You can also set the ACE to passthrough any oversize packets if you choose to.

Then you need to apply that parameter-map to a policy.

policy-map multi-match my-policy-name
class my-class-name
appl-parameter http advanced-options HTTP_MAP_HEADER_LENGTH

Hope this helps someone out. Any questions or feedback is welcome via the comments link below.

Wow – what a title!!

Hopefully this post will make things a bit clearer.

I have a Cisco 1721 router configured to be a VPN server for a few IPsec client PC’s. Currently the user authentication part is just being done with local users setup within the router config.

However we have Windows SBS 2008 internally providing Active Directory services, amongst other things.

So, my aim in this piece of work was to get the Cisco VPN using the AD accounts for client VPN user authentication.

There were two main parts to getting this working – the config on the Cisco router, and the configuration of NPS (Network Policy Service (formerly IAS) on Windows. In this post I will cover the Cisco side, and will try to put up some notes on the Windows side when I get home where I am able to grab some screenshots.

Config required for Cisco router

This is the trimmed down version of the statements I had to add/change. If you need to see full config for understanding, drop me a note.

aaa new-model
aaa authentication login default local
aaa authentication login sdm_vpn_xauth_ml_1 group radius local
aaa authorization exec default local
aaa authorization network sdm_vpn_group_ml_1 local
radius-server host 1.1.1.1 auth-port 1812 acct-port 1813 key 7 "removed"

Potential stumbling block

One snag I ran into was related to the VPN group authenticaion. During my config changes I applied the following line (remotely – DOH!!!) which killed the VPN completely.

aaa authorization network sdm_vpn_group_ml_1 radius local

The symptoms this presented was the VPN client would try to connect but fail almost immediately.

What I didn’t realise to start with was that this config statement was offloading the VPN group authentication part of the connection over to the Radius server, where I didn’t have any groups setup, as I was only looking to use Radius for the user authentication.

So by leaving removing the radius option with that statement, the Group authentication check is still done against the name/key within the crypto isakmp client configuration group section.

Hopefully this can be of use to someone else – feel free to add any comments/questions below.