Having read books about cryptography I understand the basics of the theory behind public-key authentication. This morning I've been reading the Domino Admin "help" files and finding the practice a lot harder to get my head round.

That said, with a lot of guess-work, re-reading and Googles I've managed to get my first secure connection to a Domino DB. And it's not even 11am yet!

When I mentioned Domino & SSL the other week I had no idea it was such a popular subject. It's a shame then that it's another area in which the help files let us down. They miss bits out, assume we know alsorts of stuff and list the really important steps without any emphasis. I know there's an argument that you shouldn't be messing with server configuration if you don't know what you're doing. But, not all companies have an experienced admin (and not all admins are experienced ;-), often leaving it in the hands of the developer to setup.

For want of anything better I am going to make an article out of the steps required. Written from a developer's point of view I'll try and make it as simple as possible to follow.

There are two ways to do this. One is to create your own Certificate Authority (CA) in Domino. This creates a certificate that the browser doesn't know to trust and so you see a security alert until you choose to trust it. The other way is to buy a certificate from a trusted CA. The steps involved are different. So, before I write the article, I will probably get hold of a cheap one and see how to get automatically trusted SSL connections to Domino...