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Added by Jason Helmick March 29, 2013

IIS 8 has a new feature that greatly improves certificate management. Instead of installing certificates to every server and then trying to find them later to update them, IIS 8 has a centralized certificate store for all your certificates in one place.

The mechanics of this are great and it works amazingly well, so I encourage you to grab some background on this. For this blog, I want to address and issue of configuring the store on remote computers and what I had to do to make it work.

First, to install the centralized store to a remote computer:

PS> Invoke-Command -ComputerName Core1 {Install-WindowsFeature Web-CertProvider}

Once install, there are 6 cmdlet’s to enable and configure the store on each remote server.  Easy huh?  Well, not really. The first step is to enable the feature:

PS>Invoke-Command -ComputerName Core1 {Enable-WebCentralCertProvider -CertStoreLocation \\dc\WebCerts -UserName ‘company\certuser’ -Password P@ssw0rd -PrivateKeyPassword P@ssw0rd}

Unfortunately this breaks. See the store location?  The cmdlet “checks” to verify the store location, which in PowerShell terms creates a Multi-Hop issue.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out a way around this, so here is what I did. The store can be enabled on the remote server in the registry:

PS> Invoke-Command -ComputerName Core1 {Set-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IIS\CentralCertProvider\ -Name Enabled -Value 1}

Then I set the store location in the registry:

PS> Invoke-Command -ComputerName Core1 {Set-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IIS\CentralCertProvider\ -Name CertStoreLocation -Value \\DC\WebCerts}

Then using the Set-WebCentralCertProvider cmdlet, I could set the username and password settings.

PS>Invoke-Command -ComputerName Core1 {Set-WebCentralCertProvider -UserName Company\certuser -Password P@ssw0rd -PrivateKeyPassword P@ssw0rd}

Worked like a charm!  I created new bindings for the websites and all my remote servers use the central store now.

Sometimes a cmdlet may not work properly over remoting, but with a little patience you can figure out a way!  Until next time,

Knowledge is PowerShell,

Jason Helmick
Systems Instructor
Interface Technical Training