I declare from the beginning that I am no authority on digital certificates.
This document is a summary of all the articles I have read about openssl. It describes in short how to become your own Certificate Authority (CA) and how to create and sign your own certificate requests. Make no mistake, these certificates are good only for personal use or for use in your intranet in order to provide a secure way to login or communicate with your services, so that passwords or other data is not transmitted in the clear. Noone else will or should trust these certificates.
Prerequisites
The package openssl should be installed in the machine you will use to manage your certificates or create the certificate requests.