SSL Certificate Hints
Starting with version 3.7, Power Admin products (PA Server Monitor, PA Storage Monitor and PA File Sight) support using SSL-enabled HTTP (HTTPS) for serving reports, and for console to service communication. Self-signed certs are used by default to make this as convenient as possible for you the customer.
Certifying Authority
Most SSL certificates come from a well-known certifying authority like Verisign, Thawte, GeoTrust and others. These companies charge for their certificates, which enables them to do some level of check on the company requesting the certificate. Because of this, browsers recognize certificates signed by these Certificate Authorities.
Self-Signed Certs
With self-signed certs, a Certifying Authority was not involved. That means the product has to sign it's own SSL certificates, and therefore be its own Certifying Authority. Since the browser doesn't know about this new Certifying Authority, it shows warnings indicating it doesn't know whether to trust the SSL certificate or not.
To make the browser stop displaying the warnings, you have to install the new Certifying Authority certificate into the browser as a Root CA or Trusted CA. Be careful -- only install a new Certifying Authority when you know who it is because you are telling the browser to trust SSL certificates from that authority. In this case, the Power Admin product created the new Certifying Authority on your computer. No other computer has that Certifying Authority.
For instructions on installing a new Certifying Authority in popular browsers, choose your browser below:
Instruction for installing in Internet Explorer
