Christos Polydorou

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...

On my lab environment, I've configured two Active Directory sites since most enterprises have offices in more that one places. My lab however is not running 24/7 and the domain controllers in the second site are rarely turned on in order to save resources. This leads to issues with the Active Directory replication such as the "The target principal name is incorrect" error when I execute:  repadmin /syncall /AdeP. To remedy the issue, we have to reset the machine password of the domain controller that has been offline. First off, we are going to stop and disable the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (kdc) service on the problematic domain controller, in our case DC4. There may be some tickets in the cache so we should also clear them using klist purge Now it's time to change the machine password of the domain controller using the command netdom resetpwd /s:dc3 /ud:lab\administrator /pd:* Replace the "lab\administrator" with an account on your...

Following the introduction to the Azure Advanced Analytics article  where we have provisioned an OMS Workspace and took a quick look on it's settings, we are now going to add the windows logs we would like to collect along with some system performance counters. To get to the Data settings of the workspace, we are going to use the Advanced Settings option on the main workspace blade. Here, you have to type the name of the log and then click the plus sign in order to add it. As shown below, I've started with the application and system logs that contain very useful information about the system and the applications that may be running on it. When done adding logs, click the save button to save the configuration. Now that we have configured the logs to collect, we are going to move on to the performance counters by clicking on "Windows Performance Counters". The Advanced Analytics team suggests a few counters related to disk, memory, processor and network, so go...