Having an SSL certificate in your WordPress is the de-facto standard nowadays, did you know that? Google ranks sites having HTTPS higher in their SERP. But in WordPress, how do you configure an SSL certificate and HTTPS URL? You’ll learn the important steps to move WordPress from http to https in this post.
When you use iisnode to host the Node.js blogging software Ghost on your IIS web server, and you set up an SSL certificate for your Ghost website, you may run into too many redirect issues when changing Ghost’s config.js file. This happend to me yesterday, and here is the solution.
In this post I provide you various HTTP to HTTPS redirection methods, for Windows Server IIS and Linux Apache. Use these examples to your advantage to secure the traffic between your visitors and your website.
Ok, this one is huge: Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 now has native support for IPv6! Almost exactly a year ago I asked about when we’d get IPv6 support in WSL2 on TwitterX, and now we have it.
Sometimes you need to convert a Windows SID (security identifier) to an username, or vice versa (username to SID). In this post I show you a couple of methods to translate the one into the other using VBScript and PowerShell.
Learn how to query the .bak file for header information. Whenever I need to restore an SQL Server .bak backup file, I want to know some properties of the backup file to make sure I’m working with the correct file(s). Luckily, the .bak file and PowerShell provide all the information I need, so I don’t have to start a Restore procedure in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) just to view the header information. As you know, SSMS is slow…
Do you want to know how to get the current number of connections to IIS hosted websites? The information is stored in Windows Server Performance Counters, and you can get it using Get-Counter cmdlet in PowerShell of course. But in post I’ll show you a different -and perhaps even faster- method using WMI/CIM and Win32_PerfRawData_W3SVC_WebService. Read on…
The following PowerShell snippet can be used to quickly install an SSL (or TLS) certificate in Windows Server. It assumes you have a PFX file and its password. The default location is Cert:\LocalMachine\My, to use for IIS websites.
When you have set up your ASP.NET / .NET or PHP configuration for high performing websites in Windows Server, it sometimes becomes important to reconfigure Windows Server’s TCP/IP stack and IIS too. You may have to increase network throughput and performance, or you just might run out of available ports / sockets (aka port exhaustion). And, as you know, fast page loads are more and more important nowadays for seach engine optimization (SEO) and user experience. Therefore we’ll dive into tuning IIS and TCP/IP stack for high performance websites and high volume of web requests a bit.
You can use PowerShell to install Windows Updates automatically, unattended and simple. Neat, right? For this, you don’t have to have an enterprise environment with WSUS, or Windows Server, but since this is Sysadmins of the North, I assume you do. In this post I’m going to show you how to install Windows Updates with PowerShell and the PSWindowsUpdate module.
Easily send your DevOps reporting by email with this PowerShell function, because the Send-MailMessage cmdlet is obsolete. Of course you’ll be using StartTLS and authenticated SMTP as additional security.
Recently, Jeff Starr wrote about blocking IP addresses posting random string comment spam. That post reminded me about my own older post about blocking WordPress comment spammers manually. With just a few manual steps, you create your own little blocklist for WordPress in either a .htaccess or web.config file. Here are the IP addresses I’m currently blocking. Note, this list can get long (loooonnggg).
Sometimes you need to create an additional SQL Server Login (user) for your database (databases). Here is a small T-SQL snippet that creates such a login for contained databases in SQL Server and adds memberships.
SQL Server performance monitoring in Zabbix: Keeping your SQL Server and databases in top shape is key for a good performing SQL Server database server and its databases. A good performing server makes happy customers, and that’s what puts bread on the plank, right? In this post I’ll show you how you can use Windows Performance counters, PowerShell and Zabbix for in depth monitoring of your SQL Server server and SQL databases.
Sysadmins of the North is just a technical blog, like so many others out there. Here I write about IT stuff that I find interesting, problems I encountered and solved. Topics include computers, servers, web, sysadmin, database, virtualization, optimization and security.
For the most part, I write as it comes; posts may seem incoherently written sometimes (my apologies :-) ). Drop me a comment somewhere to say hi, or discuss about any of the topics. I always love the interaction!
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Sometimes you need to convert a Windows SID (security identifier) to an username, or vice versa (an username to an SID). In this post I show you a couple of methods to translate the one into the other. One is using VBScript and one is using PowerShell.
Quickly get SQL Server backup .bak file header information using PowerShell and SQL Server Management Objects (SMO). Determine the name of the SQL server that wrote the backup set.
Do you want to know how to get the current number of connections to IIS hosted websites? The information is stored in Windows Server Performance Counters, and you can get it using Get-Counter cmdlet in PowerShell of course. But in post I’ll show you a different -and perhaps even faster- method using WMI/CIM and Win32_PerfRawData_W3SVC_WebService.
Use PowerShell to install SSL certificate in Windows Server and change its FriendlyName property. As a bonus, I show you how to verify a certificate’s Common Name (Subject) and Subject Alternative Name (SAN) using certutil.exe and PowerShell Get-PfxCertificate.
When you have set up your ASP.NET / .NET or PHP configuration for high performing websites in Windows Server, it sometimes becomes important to reconfigure Windows Server’s TCP/IP stack and IIS too. You may have to increase network throughput and performance, or you just might run out of available ports / sockets (aka port exhaustion).
In this post I show you how you can use PowerShell to install Windows Updates. Quickly and silently. This makes the use of PSWindowsUpdate module perfect for your day to day automation. The module even supports scheduling (on remote computers too!), it has the ability to search WSUS and Windows Update for updates, scheduling and performing the download and installation of updates.
In this post I provide you with a small PowerShell function you can use to send email over a TLS secured SMTP connection with SMTP authentication. As a framework you can use in your own scripting and extend it. You can even create a PowerShell module of it.
Here is a small T-SQL snippet that creates an additional (extra) SQL Server Login (User) for contained databases in SQL Server. It sets memberships too.
SQL Server performance monitoring in Zabbix: Keeping your SQL Server and databases in top shape is key for a good performing SQL Server database server and its databases. A good performing SQL Server makes happy customers, and that’s what puts bread on the plank, right? In this post I’ll show you how you can use Windows Performance counters, PowerShell / WMI and Zabbix for in depth monitoring of your SQL Server server and databases.
Here is a query you can use to query all posts in WordPress not having a Yoast SEO meta description yet. You can run this on your MySQL prompt or in phpMyAdmin.
Before you can properly debug crash and memory dumps in Windows (Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows Server), you need to install WinDbg -Windows Debugger- and its debugging symbols. In this article I explain how to set up these debugging symbols for WinDbg in Windows. Debug BSOD like a boss!
To extract all files from a .msi file, use the following msiexec command and arguments. Windows has the ability to allow the MSI package (.msi file) contents to be extracted using the command line or via a script.
If you need to connect virt-manager to a KVM host over ssh in Windows, then Windows 11 and WSL 2 made things a whole lot easier for you. Even if you need to connect virt-manager through an ssh tunnel and arbitrary port because your network is reachable only through a bastion host and ssh key authentication. Here is how.
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Currently I work as an application manager / administrator at Embrace – The Human Cloud in Groningen (the Netherlands). At Embrace we develop and manage software to automate processes and unlock knowledge, social intranets, and so forth. Smart technology helps your organization move forward.
Before Embrace, I was over 20 years at Vevida.com as a systems- and applications manager/administrator.
My experience and specialties include Windows Server, IIS, WSL & Linux (CentOS, Debian), PHP, WordPress, websites, MySQL, optimization and security. Vevida is now part of TWS, Total Webhosting Solutions, and incorporated into Yourhosting.nl. My SysOps department went to the company cldin.eu, Cldin.eu’s mission is to build the best-in-class digital infrastructures that scale.