Quickly find expiring public certificates

If you need to know when a server’s public certificate will expire, use this:

dir Cert:\LocalMachine\my | where {$_.issuer -notlike "*DC=*"} | fl subject,friendlyname,notafter

This assumes that your internal Certification Authority has an LDAP name (Windows based CAs usually do), so we’re looking for certificates NOT issued by such a CA. The next step would then of course be to automate this, for example have this script run on a daily basis, read what’s in the “NotAfter” property and alert an administrator 30 days in advance to make sure transitioning to a new certificate will not cause the service to be interrupted.

Using RDS RemoteApp from the Internet without VPN

If you’re running a Remote Desktop Services (RDS) server behind a firewall, using internal names, you’ll notice that even though you can publish the RDS website and log in from the Internet, it’s not so easy to connect to a published RemoteApp. Continue reading

The benefits of a c:\tools folder

You know how it is – you’re doing something on a server and just now putty.exe or some other small executable would come in handy. Unfortunately, it’s not there, and maybe the server you’re on does not have internet access, either. Every administrator has been in this situation before, and you know what’s next. Search for the tool on another machine, maybe download it first from the internet, then copy it to the server’s c:\temp etc. Continue reading