After I have spend several parts of this series discussing the theory of certificates, certificate authorities, certificate requests and file formats, this article focusses on Windows and how it handles certificates. I will also present several pitfalls that can make your life miserable when working with certificates and what tools are available by Microsoft.

A lot of things changed with the coming of ConfigMgr2012 (for now it’s in the state of RC1). Loads of people already wrote articles about what cool new features and goodies came with ConfigMgr2012, I instead want to have a closer look on troubleshooting, as I am in the middle of a RC1 deployment at a customer’s site.

Log Files

If you’ve already worked with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007, you most likely know that, if something goes wrong, then there are a lot of Log Files to look into.

I just came from a customer project with AppTitude where I faced the requirement that the department that was responsible for the AppTitude environment didn’t want to give the other departments the right to log on to the AppTitude console.

Why? Well, various reasons, all quite understandable!

Number one reason was that they wanted to let every department to the work they were supposed to do, not more. The software department should be responsible for the software installation and the department responsible for AppTitude should bother about analysis and report creation.

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.