The CEICW Certificate Generator Will Be Out Of The Office On February 29, 2008

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of James Frederickson and Justin Crosby]

Running the CEICW on SBS 2003 on February 29, 2008 and choosing to create a certificate may fail on Secure Web Site Configuration as seen below:

clip_image002

Text of error:

An error occurred while configuring a component.
To continue with the wizard and configure remaining components, click OK.
To end the wizard without configuring the remaining components, click Cancel.
[OK] [Cancel]

You will also see the following errors in icwlog.txt:

Web server name: mail.contoso.com
CCertCommit::ValidatePropertyBag returned OK
Opening the cert store returned OK
Reading the computer name returned OK
Reading the fully qualified server name returned OK
*** Creating the self signed cert returned ERROR 80070057
*** CCertCommit::EnableSSL returned ERROR 80070057
*** CCertCommit::CommitEx returned ERROR 80070057
calling GetBOConnector ().
Error 0x80072030 returned from call to GetBOConnector().

The reasons for this issue is that the when you have the CEICW create a self-signed certificate for your webserver,  it uses the current date +5 years.  Since there is not a February 29th in the year 2013 the wizard uses an invalid expiration date, which in turn causes the wizard to fail.

To avoid this issue choose the option to "Do not change current Web server certificate" when running the CEICW. 

The CEICW will resume normal operation the next day, March 1st, 2008.