The support site at Comodo provides answers to a wide range of questions ranging from the basic 'what is a certificate?' through to the more technical and is worth visiting. The FAQs also contain answers to some common problems you may encounter.

Domain Control Validation (DCV)

This additional security step (implemented 30 May 2012) is an email challenge-response mechanism that verifies that the SSL certificate requester owns/controls the domain to be included in the certificate. Further information can be found here.

Change Password

Allows you to change your password. The minimum length is 3 characters. You will be asked to change it on your first log in to the system. Thereafter, it can be changed at any time.

Requesting a certificate: select CSR to upload

This allows you to browse to the .csr file that you wish to upload as part of your certificate request. If you wish, you may paste in the filename, including its path. More information on CSR generation can be found at Comodo's support site.

Duration of certificate

The number of years for which a certificate is valid (1, 2 or 3 years).

Server Software

This refers to the type of software being used on the server where the certificate will be installed.

Upload CSR and preview request

This uploads the CSR into the application and provides a view of the subject of the CSR so that you can check its contents before finally confirming the request.

Confirm Request

Select this once you're happy that the CSR you have just uploaded is correct. This will then pass the request to Janet for processing. If it passes the necessary checks (either automatically or manually), the request will be passed to Comodo for certificate issuance.

List Certificates

Provides details of your organisations certificate requests

Request ID

This is a number which uniquely identifies each certificate request

Common Names

The common name reflects the fully-qualified domain name of the server on which the certificate will be installed, e.g. mailserver.example.ac.uk.

Status

In general, once the status has changed to 'Accepted for automatic processing' it should take around 30 seconds before it changes to 'Accepted by CA' and it can take up to 24 hours before it becomes available for download. However, it usually only takes 2-3 hours for the certificate to be available.

A certificate request will have one of the following status messages at any one time:

• Accepted for automatic processing – the request has been accepted by Janet and will be processed automatically by Comodo.
• Accepted by CA - The request has been accepted by Comodo.
• Rejected by CA - The request has been rejected by Comodo.
• Rejected by JTAG - The request has been rejected by Janet and a member of the JTAG group will provide more details about this.
• Waiting for manual approval - For CSRs where the commonNames are not within ac.uk or gov.uk, the request will be referred for manual processing. At this point, your request will be referred to Janet where the domain ownership information will be manually validated. Provided that's successful, the request will then be progressed accordingly. We will only need to validate such requests once, so when the system has processed one request for a non ac.uk or gov.uk domain, it should process subsequent requests automatically. We will then re-validate the domain name at regular time intervals. Please note that the very first request submitted by an organisation will be referred for manual approval.
• Certificate available for download – the certificate has been issued and can be downloaded. The certificate is available as a .zip file containing the .crt file along with the chaining and root certificates.
• Duration - This is the number of years for which a certificate is valid.