certreq.exe unable to to submit Base64 CSR - Invalid Data

Question

I am trying to script a solution to automatically submit Base64 CSRs to a Microsoft Certificate Services CA, but keep getting tripped up.

My understanding is that all I should need to specify is a Certificate Template & CSR File and it will spit out a Certificate.

The CSR is for

CN=myserver.ilo.domain.local, OU=ISS, O=Hewlett-Packard Company, L=Houston, ST=Texas, C=US

Which is a HP iLO3 device

certreq -Submit -attrib "CertificateTemplate:Webserver" infile.csr outfile.cer

Running this command however results in:

Certificate Request Processor: The data is invalid. 0x8007000d (WIN32: 13)

Using the web interface for MSCS http://certsvr/certsrv and going through the advanced settings (to set Web Server Certificate) allows me to submit a certificate Request just fine.

Does anyone know where I may be going wrong with certreq?

Solution

I now have a solution to what was going on, and rather simple.

It turned out that the CSR when being saved to a file was somehow being saved in Unicode Format rather than ANSI & as a result was inserting invalid data into the CSR request.