Filtered articles: "EFS"

In the recent past I have realized that certificates are poorly understood. But accompany us in our everyday life. In the case of IT pros this is very unsettling because they are expected to handle them with ease.

The first and most important concept about certificates is that you need to be thinking about two pieces of information. The certificate is the public part and it always has a matching private key. You may or may not require both for your needs – but continue reading and find out.

A few months ago, I have blogged about an annoying anomaly in the handling of EFS-encrypted files. My case was that copying fails for an EFS-encrypted file to a location where it cannot be encrypted by the source system (e.g. a file share). My colleague Helge Klein has apparently uncovered the cause: CopyFile(Ex).

I have been using SyncToy since the days of good old Windows XP ;-) I has been a reliable companion for swiftly backing up my data. With the update to SyncToy 2.1 on Windows 7 the situation has changed dramatically. As the source directory is EFS-encrypted and the destination directory is a network share, SyncToy fails to create new files at the destination. Unfortunately, the situation is even worse as SyncToy seems to be the victim - like myself.

What is the best way to learn PowerShell? Never use cmd.exe again!

With PowerShell 2.0 on my Windows 7 machine I decided it finally is time to polish my rusty knowledge of the language dating back to the days when PowerShell was still called Monad. In my attempt to re-familiarize myself with PoSh I consciously use it for tasks that would take me mere seconds with other tools like cmd.exe, or even old friends like Perl. But, hey, learning takes time, and there is nothing better than practice! Here are a couple of things I have learned en route.