Overview

You are following the Install or Update SSL Certificates in Lyris LM article and receive an error message when attempting to submit your CSR to your Certificate Authority (CA), 'Invalid CSR - No Common Name Was Found in the CSR' and you would like to know how to resolve it so that you can complete the process of obtaining and applying SSL to your ListManager site.

Solution

After entering the command to generate your CSR, you are asked a series of questions. Your answers are embedded into the CSR. The most common cause of this CSR rejection is an incorrect entry in the Common Name field.

The Common Name field, which is the only required field to enter while creating your CSR, is your Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), e.g. www.example.com. Make sure you are entering the FQDN and not the IP address, just part of your domain name, e.g. 'example', or your company name, e.g. 'Example Inc.', and that there are no special characters, e.g. '[! @ # $ % ^ ( ) ~ ? > < & / , . ” ‘ _]'.

Although not all fields are required, we recommend completing the following when generating your CSR:

• Common name (CN): This field is required and must be your site's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) e.g., www.example.com
• Company (or Organization – O): Your company's legally registered name e.g., Example, Inc.
• Company division (or Organization Unit – OU): The name of your department within the organization. You can leave this option blank; simply press Enter.
• Country (C): The two-letter country code where your company is legally located
• State (S): The state/province where your company is legally located
• Locality (L) or City: The city where your company is legally located

Back to top