PKI: Chrome 58 gives a warning with HTTPS connection to a Web Server

Scenario: Web Server protected by a certificate issued by Internal Certification Authority (Microsoft ADCS).

Certificate has a single Subject Name on it Internet Explorer works fine, only Chrome is affected

 

Warning:

This Server could not prove that it is <server name>; its security certificate is from [missing_subjectAltName]. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.

Resolution: I reissued the certificate and added Subject Alternative Name (SAN) with the same FQDN to it. After that I assigned the new certificate to the Web Server interface and restarted IIS. Chrome connects to the web server without any warnings now.

 

More about SAN: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625722(v=ws.10).aspx

PKI: Enterprise PKI MMC displays a Subordinated CA as offline

I built a two layer PKI infrastructure and brought an Enterprise PKI MMC to verify the infrastructure health. All is ok but an Issuing CA. That was displayed with Status: ‘Error” and the message was “This CA is currently offline or unavailable”.

 

At the same time I could right-click it, select manage and it brought a very nice working CA MMC for me. So the CA is up and running and works fine, but for some reasons shown as offline in Enterprise PKI MMC.

Google did not bring too much, but search in Technet Forums gave a clue: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/fc8f6eba-447e-4e3f-a833-3b71bb3fc575/enterprise-pkiviewmsc-error-for-new-subca?forum=winserversecurity

I granted all permissions to my Domain Admins (this is Lab, otherwise it would be a custom security group). By default it was Manage CA and Issue and Manage Certificates only.

and restarted the Certificate Services. After that Enterprise PKI became nice and green.

SCCM: SCUP 2011 on Windows Server 2016

found a nice post ( http://www.slr-corp.fr/2017/02/tips-tricks-installing-system-center-updates-publisher-scup-2011-windows-server-2016/) describing how to Install SCUP 2011 on Server 2016. Normally installation fails due to WSUS version check, but if you change WSUS version to  6.3.9600.1777 in registry (HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Update Services\Server\Setup VersionString) for time of SCUP installation you can apparently finish SCUP installation. Of course without any support from MS

or, as mentioned in the post comments just run SCUP .msi with /qb switch

Meanwhile people continue to vote for this feature for SCCM CB here: https://configurationmanager.uservoice.com/forums/300492-ideas/suggestions/8803711-3rd-party-patching-scup-integration-with-sccm-co

SCCM: Task Sequence Import fails (System.NullReferenceException)

I am leading a Windows 10 migration project currently. We prepared TAsk Sequences in Dev environment and SCCM admin tried to export/import them from Dev to Prod. Export was successfull, but Import miserably failed with

System.NullReferenceException

Object Reference not set to an instance of an object.

As usual very nice and descriptive SCCM error.

Fortunately Mike Terrill bumped into it before and wrote about it: https://miketerrill.net/2016/07/31/import-task-sequence-failure-cm-1606/

Note: When we tried to open a zip file containing TS archive using internal Windows Zip packer it failed. We used 7zip – it opens/saves the archive successfully.

Azure: Azure AD Application Proxy. Kerberos issue

One of my Customers asked about MFA for his on-prem Outlook. I offered several solutions, one of them – publish OWA site via Azure AD Application Proxy and pre-authenticate with Azure AD and MFA.

To be sure the configuration will work I built a Lab and tried to configure SSO for Internal Windows Authentication (IWA).

This configuration requires I configure Kerberos Constrained Delegation (KCD) in Active Directory and configure Delegation in Properties of a machine where I have my Azure AD Proxy Connector installed.

Everything looked easy on paper byt when I tried it in Active Directory Users and Computer MMC I received nice error: “The server is unwilling to proceed the request”

After unsuccessful googling I opened a case with Microsoft – that was a brand new domain, just couple of servers and I definitely expected everything working out of the box.

After couple of days of troubleshooting the only solution MS suggested was using an Active Directory Administrative Center instead of MMC. Even with that the first attempt failed with “Unknown error”. After the Center was restarted we could finally configure the delegation. No root cause found.

Azure: How to configure MFA when Classic Portal is not available

My company provides CSP Azure subscription for our Customers. To make life more exciting Microsoft remove Classic Portal support from CSP. So we can use new and shiny ARM-based portal only.

When time come to configure Azure AD fun begins. Azure AD node is available in the new portal as ‘preview’ and miss some features from the old portal. Recently I had fun with license assigning, today I needed to assign MFA to accounts. Fun, fun, fun….

Anyway, as in the first case office.portal.com helped. This portal is available for CSP and have some missing features of the classic portal. For example to add MFA to a user:

 

1. start office.portal.com

2. goto Users->Active Users

3. Click ‘More’

4. Click “Setup Azure Multi-factor auth’ That will open MFA portal for you

5. Configure MFA for a user or users in bulk

Azure: Use SAS token as a parameter

I recently bumped into an issue trying to pass a Shared Access Signature (SAS) token to my ARM template to be able to connect sub-templates securely. Even though SAS token looked perfectly fine in Powershell New-AzureRMDeployment cmdlet failed with the following error: Error: Code=InvalidTemplate; Message=Deployment template validation failed: ‘The provided value for the template parameter ‘_artifactsLocationSasToken’. I tried both securestring and string- no luck. A colleague of mine Jules Ouellette helped me with a solution – the token is generated as an object and must be converted to a string before passing as a Parameter: _artifactsLocationSastoken = $artifactslocationsastoken.toString()  After that conversion the token was successfully accepted as a parameter. 

SCCM: SUP is not working due to WSUS crash

Interesting case – WSUS built for SCCM SUP crashed regularly. It started from once in a month, after that more and more often and finally WSUS application pool could not stay and hour. Recommended solution was to recycle WSUS application pool. But that was not really a solution since permanent monitoring is required.

It turned out to be a known issue for SCCM 2012 (looks like SCCM CB is affected too) and Microsoft recommends to enlarge App Pool private memory to 4 (or in some cases to 8!) GB. Sounds a bit crazy for me but at least WSUS is up and running now.

More technical details in the following article: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/configurationmgr/2015/03/23/configmgr-2012-support-tip-wsus-sync-fails-with-http-503-errors/

SCCM: Clean encrypted drive before TS start

One of my Customers happens to have a McAfee encrypted drives on Laptops and Desktops he plans to migrate to Windows 10. Unfortunately McAffee version was not cooperative with SCCM and he was ok to clean the drives.

To achieve that I added a file called diskpart.txt on my file server (where my Network Access Account has access)

The file contains two lines:

Select disk 0 Clean

After that I customized the boot image by adding a pre-start command and pointing the boot image to the shared folder containing my configuration file:

The script is invoked after you press ‘Next’ on OSD dialog logon page but before you select any Task Sequence.

Did the trick for me.

SCCM: MDT boot image update failed: “Unable to mount the WIM, so the update process cannot continue”

Today I bumped into the abovementioned issue. I added some TS’ in my MDT 2013 Update 2, tweak settings for the boot image, tried to rebuild it and voila – the error.

Fortunately the fix was easy enough – I started Deployment Workbench ‘as Administrator” and this time the image was re-built successfully.