I have a Dogtag 10.0 CA system where the root self-signed certificate is set to expire next year. I plan to upgrade to Dogtag 10.7, but after that it is not clear to me what procedure I should follow to renew the root signing certificate.

I understand the general process for renewing system certificates as outlined here:

However the examples there are all for system certificates other than the root certificate, so I wanted to be clear on the steps needed.

In my testing, I found that I can renew & approve the root signing certificate as documented:

$ pki ca-cert-request-submit --profile caManualRenewal --serial 0x1  —renewal

If I use the web GUI’s “Bypass CA notAfter constraint” option to approve the request I can get the expiration date of the approved certificate set to the distant future. Is there a way to do this with the pki command line tool? When I tried, the expiration date gets capped to the current CA root certificate’s expiration date.

Then, assuming that approved root certificate is what I need, do I just run

$ systemctl stop pki-tomcatd@pki-tomcat.service

$ pki-server subsystem-cert-update ca <nickname> —cert <renewed-cert-file>

$ systemctl start pki-tomcatd@pki-tomcat.service

And then will I be able to renew the other system certificates normally later (before they expire)?

Thanks for any advice,

Matt