Category: Windows

Converting AWS ACM PEM Certificates to PFX for Windows IIS

December 6, 2025

When AWS Certificate Manager hands you a bundle of PEM files and your Windows admin demands a .pfx, it can feel like two different worlds colliding. In the cloud and Linux ecosystem, PEM is the natural format for TLS: simple text files that are easy to script, inspect, and deploy. Windows and IIS, on the other hand, live in a certificate-store universe where PFX rules. In this article we walk through the quick OpenSSL conversion from PEM to PFX, then dig into why these formats exist, why AWS only gives you PEM, and what you gain (and lose) when you move everything into a .pfx file.

Error 850 When Connecting to Vyatta VPN With Windows 8

January 12, 2014

While setting up a Windows 8 workstation to connect to a Brocade Vyatta firewall on RackSpace Cloud, I got the following error: Error 850: The Extensible Authentication Protocol type required for authentication of the remote access connection is not installed on your computer. Turns out the fix is pretty simple – on the Connections Properties -> Security tab we need to explicitly set the authentication protocols as shown in this image: Credit goes to Brendan at SysadminSpot for providing this solution: Error Connecting to VPN – Error 850: The Extensible Authentication Protocol type required for authentication…

Windows L2TP/IPSec Client Config

August 22, 2013

Here’s the procedure to configure a Windows client to connect to a L2TP/IPsec VPN server. You’ll need to know: VPN Server Address IPSec Pre-shared Secret Username Password To get started: 1. Open the “Start” menu, enter “setup a vpn” in the search box and hit Enter. The “Create a VPN connection” dialog will open. You can also get to this dialog by going to: Start -> Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center -> “Setup a new connection or network” -> “Connect to a workplace” -> Next -> “Use my Internet connection (VPN)” 2. Enter the VPN Server Address in the “Internet Address” field. Enter a name for the VPN connection like “My VPN” in the “Destination Name” field. Click the “Don’t connect now…” checkbox. Click the Next button. 3. Enter the username and password. Click the Create button. Click the Close button. 4. Open the network connections dialog by

WordPress URL Rewrites On Plesk 10 Windows

May 19, 2012

We needed to get URL rewrites working on a Plesk 10 Windows server for a client wanting friendly URLs in WordPress. Turned out to be pretty easy …. 1. Make sure the Microsoft IIS URL Rewrite 2 extension is installed. You can find it here: http://www.iis.net/download/URLRewrite 2. Create a web.config file in the folder where you have WordPress installed with the following:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
<rewrite>
    <rules>
        <rule name="Main Rule" stopProcessing="true">
            <match url=".*" />
            <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
                <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
                <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
            </conditions>
            <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php/{R:0}" />
        </rule>
    </rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>