Microsoft on John Billekens | Notes from the field

HowTo - Windows - Export certificate (pfx)

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 09:45:25 +0000

group: “Windows”

Certificates are an important part of a modern environment. They make communication safer by encrypting the traffic between the client and server. A safe way to move certificates between servers or store them safely is by exporting the certificate (private and public key) to an encrypted format. A commonly used format is “pfx” (Personal Information Exchange also known as PKCS#12). A pfx file can contain one or more certificates and is encrypted with a password. Without the correct password the pfx is useless. You commonly see that a pfx contains a (web) server certificate and one or more intermediate certificate(s) and a root certificate.

Office Online apparently only supports TLS 1.0

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 19:57:00 +0000

Recently I had to configure a new ~~NetScaler~~ Citrix ADC for a new ~~ShareFile~~ Citrix Files deployment. Two Storage Zone Controllers load balanced via a Citrix ADC with a Content switch. Nothing out of the ordinary. It was when I activated the Office Online functionality on the Storage Zone Controller configuration page the error messages appeared. Each time as we tried to open an office document we got an error “Sorry, there was a problem and we can’t open this document. If this happens again, try opening the document in Microsoft Word.” for Word documents and “We couldn’t find the file you wanted. It’s possible the file was renamed, moved or deleted.” for Excel documents. I followed all the necessary checks as described in a Citrix Files Article. But everything turned out okay, it worked as expected. What could it be? As it turned out to be the NetScaler SSL configuration was configured to high!? I always want that A+ on SSL Labs, the same with this setup. It was when I reverted the Content Switch to it’s default SSL parameters (TLS1.0 and the default Cipher suite) that Office Online started functioning. It could not retrieve the documents from the Storage Zone Controllers and thus it gave me this error messages. Luckily I had a separate Content Switch for internal and external traffic. I only had to lower the SSL settings on the internal Content Switch, this is the Content Switch the Office Online server was communicating with. So I hope Microsoft will add support for TLS 1.2 in Office Online (and give it some updates)

Making a remote PowerShell connection

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 15:16:44 +0000

In this article I will make a short description how to make a remote PowerShell connection. I needed this for a job once, tried to make a remote PowerShell connection from a Non Domain Joined machine to a Domain Joined server. I needed to re-configure the server first before making a connection. With the following code you can try and test the connection:

Spontaneously changing default printer

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 13:53:21 +0000

Yesterday I was at a Customers location and they had an issue with their printers on the XenDesktop VDI environment. Some users are using Exact to print all kinds of labels, in this case a Zebra label printer. And while they were printing labels, the label printer was set automagically as default. They started noticing this because when they wanted to print other (A4) reports, the layout was wrong and some information fell of the report. They could change the default printer back to the MFP, but when they printed labels again, you’ll get it right? I recently helped them move from Windows 10 LTSB 2015 (1507) to Windows 10 LTSB 2016 (1607) and they started noticing this issue after the switch to the new Windows version. So what could it be? Turned out to be a setting in Windows… After changing this, the issue was gone. You can change it in “Settings”, “Devices”, “Printers & Scanners” and change the setting “Let Windows manage my Default printer” to off. Or you can set the following registry key: