VPN Profile installation fails with "Certificate already installed"

Question

VPN Profile installation fails with "Certificate already installed"

Hi Folks
i am trying around to figure out running VPN on the iPhone.
Actually, when trying to install a profile iPhone tells me "Identity certificate could not be installed. Certificate has already been installed".
Ok, understood - but how to delete that certificate now?
Can't find any or where do i have to look then?
Thanks for any hint!
Best Regards
meb

Message was edited by: mebsonvaldezz

MacBook, Windows XP, Mac OS X

Posted on Jul 30, 2008 12:53 AM

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Answer 1

jvsmith

Level 1

0 points

Aug 1, 2008 3:06 PM in response to mebsonvaldezz

I had a similar issue but was unable to solve it.

You may be able to delete the certificate by going to iPhone Settings page. A previously installed profile with an Identity Certificate should be listed under a Profiles section on the page. If you click on the profile there you will be shown a button which will let you remove it, which according to some Apple documentation I read somewhere is also supposed to remove all of the certificates attached to the profile. In my case deleting the profile removed the profile from the device, but not the certificates attached to the profile - so after deleting the profile, I was unable to install a new Identity Certificate on the device or remove the existing Identity Certificate from the device.

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Answer 2

Aug 2, 2008 3:24 AM in response to jvsmith

Thank god, i'm not alone 😉

I did exactly the same you did. Just deleted the profile before.
Since that, i am unable to install a new but the same Identity Certificate.

Until now, only a device restore will help. **** it!

Message was edited by: mebsonvaldezz

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Answer 3

qrexin

Level 1

0 points

Aug 14, 2008 3:47 PM in response to mebsonvaldezz

I ran into this issue as well and I seem to have gotten passed it now. Rather than wiping my settings or restoring my iphone I used SSH to get into the phone and removed the keychain database. To do this you'll have to jailbreak though.

If you're willing to jailbreak then SSH into your iphone and navigate to /var/Keychains. Inside here you'll find keychain-2.db and TrustStore.sqlite3. Rename these files to something else or delete them.

This will wipe passwords for wireless, certificate settings and I think maybe even your saved exchange password.

After this I imported the same iphone profile but it gave me the error "the root certificate could not be installed"

I changed the iphone profile so that the root certificate wasn't included (I'm just using this for wireless anyway) and then it went in just fine. After this profile with only my user cert installed I went back to the original email and was able to replace the user cert profile with the profile containing the root certificate and didn't get that error this time.

Somewhere in this process I also reset the permissions on the TrustStore.sqlite3 file back to rw-r--r-- like the original one was but I'm not sure if this was a necessary step.

Hope that helps someone...
Good luck

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