certificate creation example

[Howard Chan]

Hello OpenSSL experts,   I've been experimenting, or more like playing around, with Openssl on Linux.  This is what I'm trying to do with OpenSSL : create a self-signed root CA certificate create a private key and then a certificate request use the root CA cert to sign the certificate request, thereby making a user certificate finally, I want to verify the cert....(ie. verify -CApath _______ newcert.pem) I'm no expert at this, but this is what I did (so far): I used 'openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout key.pem -out req.pem' for Step 1 above. I used 'openssl req -new -key privkey.pem -out cert.csr' for Step 2 above. For Step 3 above, I tried using the 'ca' command but always returned an error (which is attached), saying that it could not find files in the ./demoCA directory.  So I created a /demoCA directory on my machine containing the CA cert and it's private key and the serial and index files.  But still, when I ran the 'ca' command the same error occurs.   I know there's a CA.pl program....which I can utilize to do the cert creation...but how do I use that?  Do I need to compile it or anything before I can use that program?  I'm not sure.   So I don't know what to do for Step 3 (sign a cert request with the CA root cert).  I'm out of ideas.   Please enlighten me with some ideas, or correct my errors if you could.   Thanks alot.   Best regards,   H. Chan