Something I always wondered but never had time to research until I wrote this article is why my host header is greyed out or not available when i add a SSL certificate to my website. This is presumably a bug in IIS7.0 (at the time of writing I worked with IIS7.0, don’t know if other versions also have this problem).
When your certificate has a friendly name of “yourdomain.com” then the described behavior occurs. To change the friendly name you have to do this:
- Load MMC;
- Add Certificates snap-in;
- Select Computer Account;
- Select Local Computer;
- Browse to Personal > Certificates;
- Right click to select Properties on your cert;
- Change the Friendly name field to *.yourdomain.com;
- Reload the IIS manager snap-in.
I read about this issue in a discussion thread at serverfault.com.
Original blogpost at www.information-worker.nl