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I am trying to install SSL certificate from a certificate authority into my httpd server in CentOS 5.x. When I configure it and start the server I am getting the following errors,

[error]Init: Unable to read server certificate from file /etc/pki/tls/certs/ssl_certificate.crt
[error] SSL Library Error: 218570875 error:0D07207B:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_get_object:header too long

I am following the procedure at http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Https to set up the ssl

Any pointers would be greatly helpful

Abhishek
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    Could you please post the certificate file and the relevant config snippets? It seems that openssl doesn't like your certificate, but without more info, it's hard to say anything. – Lacek Mar 12 '12 at 08:24

4 Answers4

9

I ran across the same issue. Heres my story and solution:

I've been saving the cert as UTF-8 with BOM (Byte order Mark) So you can just open that file with vim and save it without BOM:

# vim cert.pem
:set nobomb
:wq

via: https://stackoverflow.com/a/300474

Community
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user172554
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  • Thank you! I could see the error using a `cat file.pem` and appear some strange character at the beginning of the file something like : `----- BEGIN CERTIFICATE ----` – F.Rosado Jun 27 '17 at 15:21
  • 5+ years later, this was the solution to my problem. Using Editpad Pro on Windows and UTF-8, BOM must be the default. I switched to using Windows 1252 encoding with LF only, and the error disappeared. – Capricorn1 Oct 17 '22 at 17:32
2

The cert is probably faulty/corrupt. Can you regenerate from the authority?

For example, look at:

https://forum.startcom.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2253

or

http://lists.kolab.org/pipermail/kolab-users/2005-February/001986.html

You can do some checks on the certificate using openssl:

openssl x509 -in /etc/pki/tls/certs/ssl_certificate.crt -text -noout

That should dump out the plain text of your certificate information. If it can't then there's something wrong with the certificate file.

cjc
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0

A common reason I've seen this happen is that the file generated by the certificate authority has DOS line endings. openssl on Linux does not like that and will throw this error. Run dos2unix on the key file to fix this.

clemep
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  • open up key file in text editor
  • convert from UTF --> ASCII
  • Restart apache
Fahad Sadah
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Chris
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