Let;s Encrypt on Microsoft IIS

How to install a Let’s Encrypt SSL cert on Microsoft IIS

If you’ve ever wondered how to install a Let’s Encrypt certificate on a Microsoft IIS server than this post is just for you.

Let’s Encrypt has always been pretty easy to setup on a Linux box and not so much on the Windows side. Thankfully, there are now nearly a dozen different tools that make adding a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate to a Microsoft IIS server just as easy.

In this post we’ll be focusing in on, and using the Windows ACME Simple (WACS) solution. Mostly because it’s so easy to use, how easy? Well lets take a look!

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Installing Windows 10 without using a Microsoft account

If you’ve installed Windows 8 or later you’ve probably noticed that Microsoft has been trying to push users to setup a Microsoft account and use it during the install process. Doing so gives users the ability to use OneDrive and sync various configurations and Internet Explorer (people still use IE?) favorites, settings, and history.

Since I use CloudStation on my Synology NAS and don’t care to use OneDrive nor did I want the Windows 10 test machines configurations sync’ed between them either.

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Installing Windows 10 on VMware Workstation 10

windows 10 on vmware workstation 10

VMware just announced VMware Workstation 11, which includes support for Windows 10 Tech Preview along with several other latest version operating systems, but you don’t have to wait until December when Workstation 11 is released. You can install Windows 10 on VMware Workstation 10 now!

Installation is simple and everything seems to function just fine, VMware tools installs too.

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How to install VisualEsxtop

If you haven’t already heard, VisualEsxtop is a Fling developed by a few VMware Engineers that provides a java based GUI to the every useful ESXTOP. As an added bonus provides a description of each counter, multiple windows, the ability to sort metrics, and even provide basic graphs. Oh and it’s FREE!

Setup and install on Windows 7 is pretty easy as well:

Visual ESXtop

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My VMware View Windows 7 Optimization Guide

These are the few steps I do when creating a new "Golden" image. Luckily I don’t have to do these steps all the time as I’ll create the "Golden" image when there is a new upgrade such as when we went from View 4.6 to View 5.0.1. I like to have a new fresh machine using new virtual hardware from the start. You could certainly just upgrade the virtual hardware on the "Golden" image, I just prefer to start clean.

At any rate, here’s my list. Hopefully someone might find it somewhat useful and maybe even others can improve upon it.

Preparing a new virtual machine

  1. Create New Virtual Machine – FILE > NEW > VIRTUAL MACHINE (CTRL+N)
  2. Under Configuration select CUSTOM.
  3. Select a Name, Folder, Host, Cluster, and Storage.
  4. Under Guest Operating System select Windows and then Windows 7 32bit under the Version drop down.
  5. Select which Network (VLAN) and under Adapter select VMXNET 3.
  6. Configure disk size to 30GB THIN provisioned.

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