At first, I want to mention that you can use the following CMD commands:

• certutil –ping

Pings certificate management (ICertAdmin) and enrollment (ICertRequest) interfaces. Optionally you can ping remote CA interfaces: certutil –config CAHostName\CAName –ping

What if you want to do this programmatically? Nice question! Looking to CryptoAPI reference you can find the following methods: ICertAdminD::Ping and ICertRequestD::Ping methods. However, local COM interfaces does not support these methods. Workarounds? PowerShell has workaround! Here is a simple code example, that tests CA and interface availability:

Hello мир! Yesterdays I've published another version of my PowerShell PKI module — v1.0. Here are release notes:

Installation experience

I've spent much time on reviewing existing installation experience. My main goals were:

• Provide a single package for different platforms — x86 and x64.
• Support direct updates (without requiring to manually remove previous installation).
• Provide custom installation scenarios — for current user or for all users.

As you may be noticed, previously I've used Advanced Installer (thanks to PowerShell MVP Shay Levy who advised me this product) to wrap my package in MSI. Advanced Installer has intuitive, well-designed (attractive) and rich UI and this product is (possible) the best for beginners like me. However, free license is not enough for custom installation scenarios (like 32/64-bit mixed packages, direct upgrades, patching and so on). In order to accomplish these goals, I've contacted Caphyon Advanced Installer team for some support here. Advanced Installer support was very quick and kind, so I'm ready to provide new installation experience.

Hi there! PowerShell Crypto Guy is again here!

Today I've finished SetupCA.ps1 script testing and I'm ready to share it with you. Of course this is not the first attempt to install CA role from cmdline, there is already SetupCA.vbs script written by Windows PKI team. To be honest, this is not the first PowerShell script for CA installation from cmdline. The first attempt was made by Hasain Alshakarti — http://secadmins.com/?dl_id=3. However this script just illustrates basic API functionality with ability to specify CA name, CA certificate validity and CA type. There is no error handling at all, even whether the CA can be installed on the computer.

Hi, S-1-1-0!

Finally I have finished another PowerShell PKI module release. This is not a significant release, but is quite improved. During module usage (I'm using certutil.exe less an less) I found some bugs in the previous release. Now they are fixed (at least those that were reported). The most significant change is in a new functionality. There are 3 set of cmdlets to manage the following CA settings:

Interface settings

Enrollment (ICertRequest3) and management (ICertAdmin2) interface management consist of four cmdlets:

Hi S-1-1-0! Today's topic is described in the post header :)

I guess most of you have encountered with some application/system issues. Sometimes the only information you have is Win32 error code and nothing else. To find a text message for particular error you usually use Google/Bing and/or other tools, like Err.exe from Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. Yesterday I wrote a PowerShell script that will convert Win32 error code to a readable text. The code uses FormatMessage() WinAPI function. Here is a known limitation, this function doesn't handle network-related errors (that are defined in wininet.h header file). Hopefully my script resolves this limitation by adding a reference to the wininet.dll library when it is necessary. Here is a code snippet: