About external CA support in NetBackup
You can now use X.509 certificates that your trusted certificate authority (CA) has issued.
NetBackup supports file-based certificates and Windows certificate store as sources for external certificates. It supports certificates in PEM, DER, and P7B formats.
The following terms that are specific to security certificates are used in NetBackup:
A certificate authority (CA) other than the NetBackup CA is referred to as an external CA.
Certificates that are issued by a CA other than the NetBackup CA are referred to as external CA-signed certificates or external certificates.
Certificates that the NetBackup CA has issued are referred to as NetBackup CA-signed certificates or NetBackup certificates.
A NetBackup certificate that is used for secure communications over control channel is also referred to as host ID-based certificate.
A NetBackup certificate or a host ID-based certificate is deployed on the master server during NetBackup installation. You need to manually configure an external certificate on the master server after installation.
See Configuring the master server to use an external CA-signed certificate.
You can configure an external certificate on a NetBackup host (media server or client) either during installation or after installation.
On Windows platform, if external certificates are used for host communication, the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM user must be able to access the certificates that are located at ECA_CERT_PATH. The ECA_CERT_PATH configuration option is available in the Windows registry.
On Windows platform, universal naming convention (UNC) paths (or network paths) are not supported for the following external CA parameters: certificate chain, certificate's private key, trust store, passphrase file for certificate's private key, and CRL cache.
This is applicable for the NetBackup web server certificate.
If the subject alternative name (SAN) is not empty, the certificate should contain all host names that the master server is known by (the host names that are listed in the SERVER configuration option entries of other hosts in the domain) in the SAN field of the certificate.
Requirements for the subject name of the certificate:
Subject name should not be empty.
Common name of the subject name should not be empty.
Subject name should be unique for each host.
Subject name should be less than 255 characters.
Server and client authentication attributes should be set in the certificate.
Only ASCII 7 characters are supported for the certificate subject and the subject alternative name (SAN).