Are SSL certs domain specific or web server specific.

i.e. are they

1. assigned to a domain irregarless of the ip address of the box they are living on?
or
2. assigned to a domain hosted on a particular public IP address?

been looking through wiki but cant find a simple guide to them that shows the inforamtion my manager wants.

Matt

server side

so a SSL is bought and tied to the server on which it is to reside.

its detail incudes the company who own it, which is where a user will go to ascertain that the owner of the cert is indeed the same as the site they are on to prove the site is legit.

you cant therefore move an SSL cert from server to server.

right?

It depends on the type of cert you buy. You can get universal certs for the whole domain or site specific. You can get them for multiple IP but you just have to pay an arm and a leg.

Certificates (as we know them in everyday use) are not tied to ip address, theyre tied to the exact hostname/common name that you put in when you are generating the csr. Some applications will require bind to an ip, this is resolved simply by entering the ip address in the common name field in the CSR.

You can get a single root certificate, that is - server.domain.com. This can also be used (for example) in an exchange 2007 architecture with push email to secure internal communications between the client access server and the owa server - you simply export the cert from the owa server, and import it into the client access servers.

wildcard certificates (*.domain.com) can also be got, and neither are expensive - a single root cert is about $69, and a wildcard is $169.

www.rapidssl.com are the company you want to go through. Their free trial certs are easy to get, and FULLY FUNCTIONAL. Unlike those con artists at verisign. They also work with windows mobile 5 and 6 - if you need a script to install them on a wm device I have one that I wrote for that project.