Viewing the machine account certificate manager

I’ve used certmgr.msc before, but today I needed to see the certificate manager for the machine account. Certmgr.msc opens up the current user certificate manager, and there is no option to do it within the msc. For anyone else trying to view the certificate manager for the machine account, I’ve created a short video showing how to get to it. Once you create it, you can then save it as an msc for quick access later on. I skipped that last step because right now it doesn’t look like I will be visiting it too often.

LDAP Basic auth over SSL using S.DS.P

I recently ran in to an issue where self-signed certificates were causing an LdapException to be thrown. The LdapException simply said “The LDAP server is unavailable.” Pretty ambiguous, huh? Well, long story short, the LDAP server had been configured with a self-signed SSL certificate, and that certificate wasn’t trusted on the machine I was using. How could I check this?

Well, there’s two ways to check this.

1.) I opened up the certificate manager and checked. Using Vista, click the Start menu and type “certmgr.msc” in the text field. Hit Enter and it will bring up the Certificate Manager for the machine. You can look for the certificate within a number of the folders shown.

2.) I added a callback method to the LdapConnection.SessionOptions variable. This turned out to be a necessary add for the future because I can now fully understand and report to a user why the connection was bad.