My apologies if this is a duplicate, I may just not be using the correct terminology in my queries to find what I am looking for.
I have a vendor that sent me a certificate to install in my browser so that we can access their website. We cannot get to their pages otherwise.
We similarly have a server for our distributors that has a self signed certificate currently, but we would like to implement the same private certificate system.
What is this process even called? Where do I get started? Is it just more options when creating the self signed certificate?
It sounds like you want to use client-side SSL certificates for authentication. The Apache documentation covers this use case in some detail (that's for version 2.4; see here for version 2.2).