Replacing ESX SSL is the easiest of all the vSphere components, in my opinion. Unlike vSphere 5.1, you can use Microsoft's Web Server SSL template, and there's no need to use the Java keytool or reregister the service with SSO.

Below is a script I use in conjunction with my vSphere/PowerShell Replace SSL script.

This …

While it took quite awhile to figure out how to replace vSphere 5.1 and 5.1U1's SSL certs, converting that script to work with 4.1U3 and 5.0. It probably helps that SSO doesn't exist (or I couldn't find it -- I haven't used vCenter on a regular basis since about 2006, but I've learned quite a bit from these SSL …

One month ago when I finally got my vSphere lab set up, I had no idea that getting rid of those annoying untrusted SSL errors would be such a colossal undertaking. I have my own domain CA and thought it would be easy to automate the process of replacing the self-signed vSphere SSl certs with my own trusted certs.

At …

Read this updated post instead. It's superior in a number of ways ;)

Alright, so I've wanted to setup a Remote Desktop Gateway for years, but the configuration seemed so.. time-intensive. Then I moved to Belgium, my living situation changed and I didn't want to setup a whole new VPN server to access my virtual lab. …

I recently discovered NoMachine's NX while looking for an easy way to encrypt VNC. NX, if you aren't familiar with it, is generally a PITA to setup, but well worth the pain (on Linux anyway). All traffic goes over SSH and while the performance isn't as great as Windows' RDP, it's faster and more secure than VNC. …

While I usually like conversation-style technical books (think: Manning's In Action series and many Wrox books), Microsoft's Patterns and Practices series is one of my favorite even though they feel so formal. Recently, my buddy Buck Woody posted a link to the freely available Patterns and Practices book for A Guide to …

Once, after viewing a SharePoint 2010 document library in Windows Explorer, I ran a net use and saw that Windows 7 had stored the credentials of my SSL-secured SharePoint intranet server. It took a bit of fiddling, but I eventually found you can, in fact, map a secure network drive using the command line:

net use W: …

I started on a new client site last week and my first task was immediately clear: I had to remove the Mixed Content Security prompt on the encrypted SharePoint intranet's front page. Firebug showed that my browser was making calls to feeds.feedburner.com even though the RSS feed was an entirely different address at …

Firesheep got me thinkin' that I should probably do a little more to beef up the security of my Internet connection on public networks. PPTP has always been a favorite of mine, because it hides traffic well enough to deter most people and it's easy to setup on both Linux and Windows. I ran a Windows PPTP server for …

If you find yourself on a really restrictive network but still want to connect to a remote VPN, consider this solution. It allows you to connect a Mac OS X OpenVPN client to an OpenVPN server using a static key. I figured it out using a combination of webistes, including dd-wrt's OpenVPN wiki, OpenVPN's documentation, …