Netscape Certificate Management System Release Notes

Version: 4.5

Updated on: October 10, 2001

These release notes contain important information available at the time of the Version 4.5 release of Netscape Certificate Management System (CMS). New features and enhancements, installation notes, known problems, and other late-breaking issues are addressed here. Read this document before you begin using Certificate Management System.

Check with technical support prior to installing and setting up your software and then periodically thereafter to obtain the latest release notes and manuals.

These release notes contain the following sections:


What's New in This Release

 
Feature Description/Notes
Bug fix #557698 In previous versions, CMS attempted a reverse DNS lookup when accepting a new connection. If no DNS was available, the system would work very slowly. This is now fixed.
Bug fix #558479 This fix makes the OCSP request parsing more rebust, so it can handle request from a wider variety of OCSP clients.
Bug fix #545900 SCEP enrollment can now be used with a CA configured with a PKCS#11 HSM.
Bug fix #551320 The LdapEnhancedMap mapper plug-in is now provided in the CMS mapper plugin registration area (this was originally sample code in previous versions of CMS).
Bug fix #551549 A security fix to prevent unauthorized revocations.
Bug fix #552223 A security fix to prevent unauthorized revocations.
Bug fix #553256 In PinBasedEnrollment, the parameter used to specify the pin attribute (pinAttr) was ignored. This fix corrects this behaviour.
Bug fix #552345 In the previous version of CMS, the server was inconsisent when constructing PKCS#7 certificate chains. Sometimes, the end-entity certificate was first, sometimes it was last. This fix makes the behaviour consistent - the end-entity certificate is always first in the chain, followed by its successive signers. This is to improve interoperability with PKI applications which rely on the cert chain ordering.
Bug fix #558480 CMS sometimes rendered an incorrect HTML response with the Netscape 6 browser. This behaviour is now fixed.
Bug fix (bugzilla) #63961 IE and Netscape 6 includes a feature to remember passwords a user submits in an HTML form. This is seen as undesirable in the CA enrollment page, so it is turned off by adding attributes to the HTML form.
Bug fix #558492 This fix improves the reliablity of email notification. Previously, if an error was encountered while sending email to a set of users, the entire job was aborted.
Bug fix #558261 This fix improves scaling of CMS to handle large numbers of agents.
Feature - Allow administrators to disable selected servlets The CMS SDK now includes documentation on how to disable servlets. This is useful if you need to prevent the end-entity from searching or revoking their certificates. 
Feature - Allow administrators to disallow putting certificates 'on hold' The administrator can now configure the RevocationConstraints policy with the parameter 'allowOnHold' to disallow users from putting their certificates on hold.
Feature - Allow end user to import, download, and view delta-CRLs CMS now provides a user interface to view and download Delta CRLs.
Feature - Make CMS start when rebooting NT without having to login as a user CMS can run automatically when either an NT or Unix system boots, without having a user login. Instructions for setting this up is included in the 'misc' folder in the CMS SDK.
Feature - Improve Random Number Generator entropy by collecting UI events during installation wizard CMS now collects additional mouse events from the user during installation to provide additional entropy to the CMS Random Number Generator.


Software/Hardware Requirements

 
 
Solaris Platform Requirements
OS Version Solaris 2.6 or 8 (with relevant Java 2 patches )
Machine Ultra 10 or faster
RAM 128 MB (required)
Hard disk storage space requirements Total required is approximately 400 MB, as follows: 
  • Total transient space required during installation: 100 MB
  • Hard disk storage space required for installation:
    • Space required for setup, configuration, and running the server: approximately 250 MB
    • Additional space to allow for database growth in pilot deployment: approximately 50 MB
    • Total disk storage space for installation: approximately 300 MB
Other Requirements You must install as root in order to use well-known port numbers (such as 443) that are less than 1024. If you do not plan to use port numbers less than 1024, you do not need to install as root. If you plan to run as root, you should also install as root and specify nobody as the default run-as user and group
Windows NT Platform Requirements
OS Version Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6a, or Windows 2000 Server SP2
Machine Pentium 350 or faster
File system NTFS
RAM 128 MB of RAM (recommended)
Hard disk storage space requirements Total required is approximately 350 MB, as follows: 
  • Total transient space required during installation: 100 MB
  • Hard disk storage space required for installation:
    • Space required for setup, configuration, and running the server: approximately 200 MB
    • Additional space to allow for database growth in pilot deployment: approximately 50 MB
    • Total disk storage space for installation: approximately 250 MB
Other Requirements On a Windows system, you must install as Administrator or a user with Administrator privileges (that is, the user must be in the Administrators group).


CMS Documentation

The complete set of CMS documentation for this release includes the following: After you run the setup script as described under Installation Procedure , check this file for a complete list of documentation installed with the product:
<server_root>/manual/index.html, where <server_root> is your CMS installation directory. The index file also contains links to Netscape Directory
Server and Netscape Administration Server documentation, as these get installed along with the CMS documentation listed above.


Installation Procedure


Upgrading From a Previous CMS Version

Upgrading from a previous version of CMS can be accomplished by installing into the same server root as the previous installation. It is advisable to backup the entire server root before upgrading.


Important Notes and Known Bugs

This section lists important notes, bugs, and known issues, and provides workarounds for some of the problems that you may encounter with the product. (The problems are identified by bug numbers to help you refer to them if you need to contact technical support.)
 

Administration Server

Authentication

Backup and Restore

Browser

CA Cloning

CEP Support

CGI Support

You can configure Certificate Management System to run CGI scripts by putting the CGI script (or executable) in a directory under the end-entity gateway's doc-root (<server_root>/cert-<instance_id>/web/ee) or agent gateway's doc-root  (<server_root>/cert-<instance_id>/web/agent), and by editing the configuration file to include information about the CGI script. [# 384101]

To configure the server to run a CGI script:

  1. Stop Certificate Management System.
  2. Go to this directory: <server_root>/cert-<instance_id>/web/ee
  3. Create a directory for putting your CGI script, for example, cgi-bin.
  4. Copy your CGI script to the cgi-bin directory.
  5. Change to this directory: <server_root>/cert-<instance_id>/config
  6. Open the configuration file, CMS.cfg, in a text editor.
  7. Add the following lines:

  8. eeGateway.servletName.CGI=com.netscape.certsrv.http.CgiServlet
    eeGateway.servletAlias./cgi-bin=CGI
    In this example, any file under the cgi-bin directory, or any path starting with /cgi-bin/ in the eeGateway will be executed as a CGI.
  9. Save your changes.
  10. Close the file.
  11. Restart Certificate Management System.

Command-Line Tools

CRLs

Custom Plug-in Modules

Directory Server

DSA

Enrollment

Enterprise Server

Extensions

Hardware Tokens

Installation

Internationalization

Job Scheduling/Notification

JSS

Logging

Miscellaneous

OCSP

Performance

Personal Security Manager

Policies

Publishing

Remote Registration Manager

Renewal of CMS Certificates

Request Queue Processing

Revocation

Samples and SDKs

Searching for Certificates

Starting/Stopping the Server

UI (Netscape Console/CMS Window)

wTLS


For More Information

Your feedback is welcome and extremely helpful for improving the product. Before contacting us to request assistance, please check the documentation for this release. If you need further assistance or information about Certificate Management System or if you need to report problems with this product, contact technical support. You may also contact us through our newsgroup for support, questions, answers, and the latest information:
snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.dev.certificate
You might also find it useful to subscribe to the following newsgroups, where security- and directory related topics are discussed:
snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.dev.ssl
snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.dev.security
snews://secnews.netscape.com/netscape.dev.directory
So that we can best assist you in resolving problems, please be sure to include the following information: For problems involving the use of certificates issued by Certificate Management System in other products, include the product name (for example, Netscape Communicator or Netscape 6), the release number, and platform information for those products as well.

Use of Netscape Certificate Management System is subject to the terms described in the license agreement accompanying it.
Software applications: © 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Some software code: © 1999, 2001 Netscape Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.

Netscape and the Netscape N logo are registered trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation in the United States and other countries. Other Netscape logos, product names, and service names are also trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation, which may be registered in other countries. Other product and brand names are the exclusive property of their respective owners.