Cannot enable admin role for certificate - Error "Certificate must contain the FQDN..."

[Madura Malwatte]

ISE 2.2

Running into this weird issue, I am renewing my publicly signed certificate used for all usage types (EAP, Portal, Admin, etc). I am able to assign portal and eap to the new certificate, but not Admin.

When I try to assign Admin to the new certificate I get this error: "Certificate must contain the FQDN " or a matching wildcard as a DNS name in the SubjectAlternativeName (SAN) extension."

Error message looks a bit broken in the sense that it doesn't mention the FQDN of the node and just a single quote ". The error message should show the node's FQDN correctly, but it doesn't. The new certificate CN and SAN DNS name match exactly and matches the FQDN configured on the node. The thing is the node's FQDN is all lower case while the certificate has the FQDN in all uppercase. I couldn't find anything in the documentation stating the certificate matching for Admin is case sensitive. It mentions best practice to have FQDN as lower case, but nothing about the matching being case sensitive. Can someone please confirm?

And as a test in my lab (ISE 2.4) I just generated a self-signed cert with all upper case FQDN CN and SAN's while my node is lower case and had no issues associating the cert with Admin. Do you know what could be the issue here?

[Arne Bier · Accepted solution]

could it be that the certificate has a typo in it (trailing space) or 0O/l1 mismatch etc.?  Unicode?

I sometimes run the cert through openssl to display it in plan text.  If the cert is in PEM format then

openssl x509 -in cert.pem -text

And if it's in DER format then openssl x509 -inform DER -in cert.pem -text

It could also be a bug.  But see if the FQDN is an EXACT match (apart from the case, which *shouldn't* matter)

[Madura Malwatte]

Hi Arne,

Thanks, that's some good suggestions. I suspect it could be a trailing space. Will check via openssl and see how it goes.

[Madura Malwatte]

No luck, the certs seem fine (no typo, no trailing space). Tried a new CSR with CN/SAN FQDN all lower case to match the node FQDN, still get the same error. Also tried a self signed cert, no luck. 

Looks like a bug to me, the node cannot get its own hostname or domain.

ise-psc.log:
2019-04-10 17:19:27,861 ERROR [admin-http-pool20][] cpm.infrastructure.certmgmt.api.CertMgmtService -:admin::editLocalCert:- Exception occured while getting hostname or domain name
2019-04-10 17:19:27,865 ERROR [admin-http-pool20][] cpm.infrastructure.certmgmt.helpers.CertificateValidationHelper -:admin::editLocalCert:- Certificate must contain host FQDN '' as a DNS name in the SubjectAlternativeName (SAN) extension. DNS value(s) in SAN of the certificate: ise.company.com

then dumps a bunch of java errors.

Anyone from Cisco able to confirm if this is a known issue? Mind you the ISE is running 2.2 patch 2 (which probably explains if its a bug).

[Jason Kunst]

Please open a tac case