Installing the Drew certificates on your Mac
Drew provides some security by using certificates, which are essentially small files that serve to guarantee the identity of websites, so that browsers to those sites can be sure that they are getting data from the source they think they are. The main effect of this is that your browser will ask you whether to trust a given site based on its certificate, if it can't verify for itself the identity of the signer of said certificate. There are third-parties that provide signed certificates for general use, but Drew uses certificates that are self-signed. The net result is that you get a warning whenever you go to a Drew-signed site (like CampusWeb).
Now all you have to do is tell your Mac to accept those certificates. Apple provides an application called Keychain Access that can be used to handle most certificates, but not this kind. Fortunately, thanks to the UNIX underpinnings of the OS, there is a free tool to do this for you.
To install the certificates:
- Get the certificates from CNS. There are two of them and you can find them here. (Opens in a new window.) Save them where you can find them again (of course).
- Get the tool that installs them. It's called CerttoolGUI ("Certificate Tool Graphical User Interface") and is freely available at a number of places, including this one. (Opens in a new window.)
- Run this application, and tell it where the two certificates are by choosing the "Add certificate" option, followed by "Import certificates". (CerttoolGUI complained about the format of the drew-edir-ca.der certificate, but installed it anyway, as far as I can tell.)
- That's it. Safari shouldn't ask you about the certificates anymore. You can test this by going to CampusWeb and seeing if you get a warning.
That should be it, but e-mail me jmuccigr@drew.edu if you have any problems.
