Installing EJBCA on Azure Virtual Machine. 2014, December 12

For a while in the background I was wondering are there any open-source PKI software that would have rich functionality and was at the same time reliable, with web-based interface and with support of SCEP. Looks like I found one - EJBCA.

 

Below I am describing how I installed it on the VM hosted in the Windows Azure Cloud.

  1. Using Azure management portal, created new Virtual Machine from the gallery - Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
    Note: If you have an MSDN subscription, then you should have Azure credits, which you can use towards using Azure service like VM on the cloud, web site, or others. Refer to Microsoft Azure web site for details.
  2. Enabled endpoints for SSH (port 22), and RDP, and https (public port 443, private port 8443, as EJBCA uses this port by default).
    Note: to connect to the Ubuntu VM over SSH you can use the tool called PuTTY).
  3. Connected to the created VM over SSH. Installed xrdp following instructions given on http://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=5305 (basically it is installing xrdp itself and then installing xfce desktop environment and associating it with xfce). After that was able to connect to it from my laptop running Windows 8.
    In case if the given above link is broken, here are the commands to run:
    Installed firefox (sudo apt-get install firefox)
    1. sudo apt-get install xrdp
    2. sudo apt-get update
    3. sudo apt-get install xfce4
    4. echo xfce4-session >~/.xsession
  5. Launched firefox from the terminal, and opened EJBCA web site, Documentation / Installation / Ubuntu quick start page.
  6. Installed OpenJDK following instructions;
  7. Downloaded JBOSS and EJBCA following instructions. Note that there was a newer version of the EJBCA then referred to in the documentation, I did download a newer one (ejbca_ce_6_2_0.zip).
    wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/ejbca/files/ejbca6/ejbca_6_2_0/ejbca_ce_6_2_0.zip
  8. Followed further instructions, and finally got EJBCA web configuration site running.