One of the most common problems that our teams deal with is ensuring that SSL certificates are working correctly. We’ve all had that urgent call in telling us that the web site is down or some key API or authentication function is offline - only to find out it was caused by an expired certificate.
An easy way of preventing this situation would have been to set up a task that continuously tests your SSL endpoints (internal and external web apps and sites, REST API’s etc.
Introduction One of the cool new features in Windows Server 2016 is Operation Validation Framework. Operation Validation Framework (OVF) is an (open source) PowerShell module that contains:
A set of tools for executing validation of the operation of a system. It provides a way to organize and execute Pester tests which are written to validate operation (rather than limited feature tests)
One of the things I’ve been using OVF for is to continuously test parts of my infrastructure.
Windows Server 2016 is now GA and it contains some pretty exciting stuff. Chief among them for me is support for containers by way of Docker. So, one of the first things I did was start installing Windows Server 2016 VM’s (Server Core and Nano Server naturally) and installing Docker on them so I could begin experimenting with Docker Swarms and other cool stuff.
Edit: If you’re looking for a DSC configuration for setting up Docker on a Windows 10 Anniversary Edition machine, see the Windows 10 AE section below.
Introduction One of the PowerShell Modules I’ve been working on for the last year is called LabBuilder.The goal of this module is:
To automatically build a multiple machine Hyper-V Lab environment from an XML configuration file and other optional installation scripts.
What this essentially does is allow you to easily build Lab environments using a specification file. All you need to do is provide the Hyper-V environment and the Operating System disk ISO files that will be used to build the lab.
Exporting a Base-64 Encoded x.509 certificate using PowerShell is trivial if you have the Export-Certificate cmdlet available. However, many of the nodes I work with are Windows 7 which unfortunately doesn’t include these cmdlets. Therefore I needed an alternate method of exporting these Base-64 encoded x.509 certificates from these nodes.
So I came up with this little snippet of code:
Hope someone finds it useful.
