Nearly four years ago (whoa), I wrote a super simple blog on enforcing https for secure SAP BusinessObjects BI4 landscapes. As a practice for our internal development and test systems, I want to make sure we continue to eat our own dog food and live by blogs like this. It’s a simple security step to follow that doesn’t really cost us anything.
While applying this very blog against a new system I built this week, I found that my blog was a little stale. I noticed that when going through Step 3 I was getting a new error with the latest version of OpenSSL v1.1.0c. The important part of the error:
WARNING: can't find some_path/openssl.cfg
The thing to note in this was that “some_path” didn’t match where I knew I had actually installed OpenSSL. The easy/red flag here was that OpenSSL didn’t get installed correctly to my path on this server. Whether Windows or *nix, OpenSSL’s BIN director should be a part of the path, as this is ultimately where openssl.cfg in your OpenSSL installation resides.
I said it four years ago, and I’ll say it again, it’s low complexity and low risk to install self-signed SSL certificates in your lower SAP BusinessObjects environments. It’s only an iota-more difficult to install a real, trusted certificate in your SAP BusinessObjects production environment. Be the hero and make it so.