How-to create a request, install & bind a 3rd party SSL certificate on Windows Server 2008 Server Core

Purpose: The aim of this document is to provide step by step procedures on creating a certificate request, installing and binding a 3rd party SSL certificate on a Windows Server 2008 Server Core installation system. This document assumes that you have already installed IIS 7.0 and enabled IIS Remote Management.

Requirements

• IIS Manager
• IIS Management Console
• Remote Desktop
• SSL Certificate

3rd party SSL certificate installation and binding on Windows 2008 Server Core

This post is courtesy of Jorge Ovando Zalapa.

How-To make a Certificate Request in Windows 2008 R2 Server Core

Credit for the following answer goes to my sys/network admin John Kauffman and to Experts-Exchange guru Paranormastic:

certreq -new c:\temp\request.inf c:\temp\certrequest.txt
certutil -f -addstore My c:\temp\certname.cer

If you have problems, you may need to reassociate the private key. Try this:
certutil -dump certname.cer | more
(search for “Serial Number” and substitute below)
certutil -repairstore My %SerialNumber%
certutil -store My %SerialNumber%

Reference: How to make a Certificate Request on a Windows Server Core VM 
(link requires an Experts-Exchange account)

Related Links

Installing & Binding 3rd party SSL certificates on Windows 2008 Server Core

How-To Set Default Printers by Computer OU when Deploying Printers via Windows 2008 Group Policies

If you’re in an organization running Microsoft Window 2008 servers, there’s a good chance you are deploying printers via group policies.  It’s awesome, life is great expect for one thing – those pesky default printers.  Only if you could set all the default printers based on computer OU’s… fortunately there’s a solution,  check out this great article:
Setting Default Printers with Windows 2008 Server Group Policy Preferences
Setting Default Printers with GPP Using Loopback Processing

Monitoring Memory Usage with Process Explorer

Process Explorer provides a lot more information than the built-in Windows Task Manager, and once you start using it you won’t want to go back.  But I have noticed that often times when people first start using it that they have trouble comparing apples-to-apples.  For example how do you get Process Explorer to look like the “Processes” tab?

Hint: Click on “View” in the top menu bar.
Click on “Select Columns“
Check “User Name“
Click on the “Process Memory” tab.
Check “WS Private Bytes“
Click the “OK” button

Does that look more like what your used to?

If you want an enhanced version of the Windows Task Manager “Performance” tab just double-click on any of the graphs at the top.

Process Explorer can be downloaded here http://bit.ly/2QxebL