This is the ssl.csr/ directory of Apache/mod_ssl where PEM-encoded X.509 Certificate Signing Requests for SSL are stored. Per default the following file is provided: o server.csr: This is the server certificate signing request for Apache/mod_ssl corresponding to the ../ssl.crt/server.crt file. Per default this is a dummy file, but may be overwritten by the `make certificate' target under built-time. Then it contains the CSR which you can send to a public Certification Authority (CA) for requesting a real signed certificate (which then can replace the ../ssl.crt/server.crt file). You can also use this directory for temporarily storing CSRs from within your (CGI-) scripts when you want to perform client authentication with your own CA instance. You can view the ingredients of a particular CSR file in plain text by running the command: $ openssl req -noout -text -in .csr