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.

Use PowerShell to win the lottery!

Good morning and happy new year!

It just occurred to me that this could be the year where I win the lottery. Of course first I would have to play in the lottery, and then there’s the small matter of hitting the right numbers.

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Extending the PowerShell ISE with Exchange functionality

Need to do some serious PowerShell scripting around Exchange? Then Notepad probably won’t cut it, no syntax highlighting, online help etc. The solution is to extend the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) with Exchange functionality.
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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

Reconnecting iSCSI Targets

Recently I noticed that my backups were failing. I’m using Windows Server Backup with iSCSI LUNs mapped to individual servers. After looking at a server, I saw that the iSCSI LUN was no longer present on the server.

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Using PowerShell to SSH into your openelec (XBMC) mediacenter

A while ago I finally gave up on Windows Media Center because of too many issues, mainly video driver in combination with HDCP sillyness. I’m over it now, having found XBMC as a more than worthy alternative. Continue reading

Finding and updating virtual machines with outdated tools on vSphere using PowerShell

Recently I updated my vSphere 4.1 environment to vSphere 5. The main reason was so that I could start testing Windows 8 client and server, which currently aren’t supported on vSphere 4.x. Continue reading