CSR Generation Instructions

The following instructions will guide you through the CSR generation process on F5 BIG-IP Loadbalancer (version 9). To learn more about CSRs and the importance of your private key, reference our Overview of Certificate Signing Request article. If you already generated the CSR and received your trusted SSL certificate, reference our SSL Installation Instructions and disregard the steps below.

  1. Open the F5 BIGIP Web GUI.
  2. Under Local Traffic select SSL Certificates and then Create.
  3. Under General Properties enter a certificate friendly name which will help distinguish the CSR going forward.
  4. Under Certificate Properties enter the following CSR details:
    • Issuer: Select the issuing “Certificate Authority”.
    • Common name: The FQDN (fully-qualified domain name) you want to secure with the certificate such as www.google.com, secure.website.org, *.domain.net, etc.
    • Division: Your department such as 'Information Technology' or ‘Website Security.’
    • Organization: The full legal name of your organization including the corporate identifier.
    • Locality, State or Province, Country: City, state, and country where your organization is legally incorporated. Do not abbreviate.
    • Email Address: Your email address.
    • Change Password, Confirm Password: Your password.
  5. For Key Properties, select RSA & 2048.
  6. Click the Finished button.
  7. Locate and open the newly created CSR in a text editor such as Notepad and copy all the text including:

  8. -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----
    And
    -----END CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----

  9. Return to the Generation Form on our website and paste the entire CSR into the blank text box and continue with completing the generation process.

Upon generating your CSR, your order will enter the validation process with the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) and require the certificate requester to complete some form of validation depending on the certificate purchased. For information regarding the different levels of the validation process and how to satisfy the industry requirements, reference our validation articles.

After you complete the validation process and receive the trusted SSL Certificate from the issuing Certificate Authority (CA), proceed with the next step using our SSL Installation Instructions for F5 BIG IP Loadbalancer (version 9).