On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 06:39:15PM +0100, Ben Stover wrote:

According to some tutorial pages I generated with OpenSSL a (selfsigned) certificate.

This file stunnel.pem contains the certifictae as well as the private key.

Is this usual/recommended?

That sort of falls into the "tragedy waiting to happen" category. The certificate is supposed to be given to clients, and the key belongs to the server and has to be kept private or there's really no point in using SSL.

Or should user put these two parts in two independent files?

Yes, absolutely. In fact I suppose you're using Windows or went through some hoop-jumping to combine them, because in "normal" OpenSSL usage the key is generated first and then the certs are requested and signed by the CA (or selfsigning) key.

/jl