Naming trouble with a new certificate

January 18th, 2012
#provisioning

The other day I had to resubmit my CSR file to the iOS Provisioning Portal as I was moving mac (and no longer had access to my old mac to move credentials across). Having did this before (on this mac in fact) I thought it would be a straight forward task:

  1. Open Keychain Access
  2. Select "Request a Certificate from a Certificate Authority"
  3. Fill in details and save to disk
  4. Upload CSR file

However I was getting caught out on point 3, no matter how many times I requested a certificate it wasn't being saved to disk despite no error message being produced. So I restarted my mac thinking that it may have got confused and that might solve the issue however when it booted up and I attempted to create a CSR I still couldn't find on disk.

I decided to look through the saved keys that I already created on my mac and noticed that I had one with the same name that I was entering into the "Common Name" field during certificate creation, once I changed this be a unique name Certificate Assistant created my CSR and all was good again.

What do you think? Let me know by getting in touch on Twitter - @wibosco