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My certificate is missing it’s public key….

Autor brendon | 03.11.2011 | Category Server, TechStuff

Ever had a problem where you KNOW the certificate private key is on the server but the certmgr says otherwise??

I Found a really usefull post which shows how to fix Just this issue!

Option #1:Repair Damaged Certificate (Windows Server 2003/2008)

1. Open MMC and add the Certificate Snap-In for the Local Computer account.
2. Double-Click on the recently imported certificate
3. Select the Details tab.
4. Click on the Serial Number field and copy that string
5. Open up a command prompt session. (cmd.exe aka DOS Prompt)
6. Type: certutil -repairstore my “SerialNumber” (SerialNumber is that which was copied down in step 4.)
7. After running the above command, go back to the MMC and Right-Click Certificates and select Refresh (or hit F5 in the MMC)
8. Double-Click on the problem certificate. At the bottom of this window (General tab) it should state: “You have a private key that corresponds to this certificate.“

30 seconds later – Legend!

Just keep in mind, SBS likes to have any certificates with a subordinate authority also have their certificates listed in the MMC -> Certificates -> Server -> Trusted Subordinate Authorities.

Office365 Performance KB

Autor brendon | 21.10.2011 | Category Rant

A fairly useful KB article on how to check and resolve performance issues http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2441551

Unfortunately item 12, should be listed as item 1….

Hyper-V Session Notes

Autor brendon | 30.07.2010 | Category Rant

I recently did some free M$ run training on the Hyper-V R2 & System Centre VMM. Good and interesting, I can definitely see this being useful for a number of our smaller deployments. Small things put MS ahead of VMWare I see are:

• Support for USB monitoring of UPS / USB Backup Disks pass through.
• Built-in support for existing AD authentication, no special ‘root’ passwords for individual ESX hosts.
• Group Policy Support.
• Time based power management policy for Hyper-V hosts. (Low power after hours).
• FREE Hyper-V R2 version of 2008 server. Downloadable direct from Microsoft.
• Host updates can be done using existing WSUS server.

Keeping all this in mind, I still see VMWare vSphere as the king of the data centre. I just think (similar to Terminal Services and CITRIX) Microsoft will catch up over the next few years.

My notes from the sessions are here:

Lotus Domino 5 to Exchange 2007

Autor brendon | 30.07.2010 | Category Rant

I recently had to run a migration from a Lotus Domino 5 server to Exchange 2007 on SBS 2008. Microsoft has released a funky little tool to assist in the synchronisation of Domino & Exchange address lists and allow the graceful migration of mailboxes. MSExchange.org has a useful article on how to configure the free Microsoft connector ‘MS Transporter Suite‘

The mailbox migration had me stumped as the Domino 5 was not hosting several of the required roles PLUS Lotus notes version 6 to 7 must be installed on the server for the import to work.

As we were doing a single import of all users mailboxes and not planning on running the two systems in parallel, the toolbox gives the ability to import mail items directly from the domino NSF files. There are a few gotcha’s but read on for the steps I followed to import the user mailboxes: