Previewing ‘Windows 8’

The first preview of Microsoft's new Operating System, internaly codenamed "Windows 8" by Julie Larson-Green, Corporate Vice President, Windows Experience.

Popular posts from this blog

Managing Active Directory User Certificates using PowerShell

I first came across user certificates when I was working with email certificates a few years ago and I have to admit that I had trouble updating the certificates on the objects! Most organizations have a Microsoft Active Directory Certification Authority that issues the certificates used internally. When a certificate is issued to a user, the Microsoft Certificate Service saves the public key in Active Directory. The userCertificate attribute is a multi-valued attribute that contains the DER-encoded X509v3 certificates issued to the user. Although we rarely need to pay attention to this attribute, there are cases where we have to update it. To make things easier, I've written PowerShell functions to Get, Remove, Import and Export the certificates on that field. To get the list of certificates for an object, use the Get-ActiveDirectoryObjectCertificate function: PS C:\> Get-ActiveDirectoryObjectCertificate -UserPrincipalName cpolydorou@lab.local DistinguishedName  ...
Keep reading

IIS Client Certificate Revocation Check Disable

Image
A couple of weeks back, a certificate was approaching it's expiration date on an IIS server and the update - although pretty straight forward, caused a major issue for the service running on that server. I had the new certificate in PFX format, I've installed it on the computer certificate store and it was available in the IIS Manager console. All the certificates for the Root and Intermediate authorities were property installed and the clients had access to the CRL urls. However, when I switched the certificate, the clients were not able to communicate property with the website. After going through the logs on the clients and the application, I discovered that the clients were using client certificates in order to authenticate and the validation process was failing for those certificates since my server could not check their revocation. I opened up a command prompt to get more information on the bindings on the website since there are settings that are not available when...
Keep reading

Send Syslog Messages from PowerShell

Image
In most cases, the scripts, functions and cmdlets we develop have to save events to a log file to make troubleshooting easier. With PowerShell, the easiest thing would be to write an event to the event log or a file. When it comes to centralized log management, most organizations have based their strategy on the syslog server and protocol. There may be agents on the windows server machines that your code is running on to collect the messsages but that's not always the case. So how can we send messages to a syslog server directly using PowerShell? Although that's not that hard, I've put together a cmdlet to do just that! My General PowerShell module that is published on the Gallery  contains the   Send-SyslogMessage cmdlet from version 2.12.0 onwards. A call to the Send-SyslogMessage would be pretty much like the following: Send - SyslogMessage - Server syslog . lab . local ` - Severity Error ` - Facility Local0 ` ...
Keep reading