ADFS export and import claim transformation rules

Moving to AD FS it is wise to prepare to lab to test the whole infrastructure and then move to the production. One of the most frustrating things you will have to do is the claim transformation rules that you will have to setup between all Claims Providers and the Relying parties. Fortunately instead of using the UI and adding the rules one by one, you can setup only one and the export and import the claims rules to the rest of the parties.

Create self signed certificate

Visual studio comes with an exquisite tool to create a self signed certificate which you can use for Exchange/IIS/ADFS/whatever you like.

makecert -r -pe -n "CN=name.domain.com" -e 01/01/2020 -ss my -sr localMachine -sky exchange -sp "Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider" -sy 12

Note that this will store the certificate in your local machine certificate store but it’s marked as “private key exportable” (-pe) so you can export it from there.

 I have also created a .bat file in order to automate the localhost certificate generation. Don't forget to export the ca.localhost certificate and add it as a trusteed root certificate authority.
 

Migrating from eSXi to Hyper-V

In order to transfer a virtual machine from vmware’s eSXI server to Hyper-V we used disk-2-vhd to clone the disk in a vhd. If you are planning to do such a task, make sure you remove the vmware tools *before* you clone the disk cause otherwise the installer will not do it afterwards.

Running webinos widget browser with custom sources

Having installed the webinos widget browser on windows it works fine but if you want to run it using the latest webinos sources from the repository or even use your own custom version, then you need to do some more steps.
So here's the process.

Building openSSL on windows

In order to build openSSL from the source code you will need to install a couple of third party free software. In this post I describe what I did on a virgin windows pc in order to build openSSL 1.0.1c.

Windows Autologin

Sometimes you might need to set a user password although you don’t really need to. The most common reason to set one is to allow the user to connect through remote desktop. This will force you to authenticate every time you boot the machine. In order to avoid that (please make sure you do understand the security risks of doing that, I personally use this only on my virtual machines and only if I don’t care about securing my files) you can follow these simple steps.

Unable to create a site based on the “Enterprise Search Center” template

I have run into a site collection which couldn’t create a search site (they were trying to create one using the “Enterprise Search Center” template) although you could create one in the same sharepoint farm if you created a new site collection (based on the existing templates and even blank). The only obvious difference was the template they created the site collection from, which was the root of all evil.

Modifying devices and drivers on windows

In this post I am going to show how to reset the auto numbering of new devices, how to see drivers for devices that are not connected on your pc and how to see which usb is connected to which usb controller in order to maximize the data throughput by using both controllers (which is the case of most modern laptops).

MySQL drop all tables that follow a pattern

Playing around with drupal I had to drop all tables that were created by a module. To do so I used the following chain of commands :
mysql -u your_user -D your_database_name -e "show tables" -s | 
  egrep "^Whatever_" | 
  xargs -I "@@" echo mysql -u your_user -D your_database_name -e "DROP TABLE @@"
This will print out all the shell commands to drop the tables beginning with "Whatever_" (note the ^ regex notation). If you want it to actually execute those commands, remove the word "echo".

“Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission’” fix

If you try to transfer an old DNN installation to a brand new Windows Server 2008 R2 you will probably run in the following run time error:
" System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Web.AspNetHostingPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed."

Setup sharepoint server 2010 on an sql server 2012 using local account

To avoid installing the sqlserver express 2008 engine that is bundled with sharepoint server 2010, you must manipulate the installation a bit. First and foremost, install sql server 2010.  Then start the SP 2010 installation as part of a farm. When the installation reaches the final step, uncheck the “configure server” option. Install sharepoint 2010 sp1 (in order to drop the system stored procedure sp_dboptions dependency). Only then, can you configure the server to connect to the already installed sql server.

Compile git on iPad

Having gcc up and running on an iPad, you should make a symbolic link so that cc points to gcc in /usr/bin (ln /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/cc) .

Download and extract the latest source from gitHub

curl –O -k https://nodeload.github.com/git/git/tarball/master

tar xvf master

Build by issuing the following command in the extracted source dir (which I renamed to git):

make NO_PERL=1 NO_TCLTK=1 NO_GETTEXT=1

Sign the app:

ldid –S git

And you are ready to use git to clone the webinos repository  

iPad:~/git root# ./git clone git://github.com/webinos/Webinos-Platform.git ../webinos
Cloning into '../webinos'...
warning: templates not found /var/root/share/git-core/templates
remote: Counting objects: 4297, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2384/2384), done.
remote: Total 4297 (delta 1827), reused 3944 (delta 1647)
Receiving objects: 100% (4297/4297), 46.08 MiB | 275 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1827/1827), done.
Checking out files: 100% (1682/1682), done.

iPad iOS 5.1 “configure: error: connot run C compiled programs.”

I recently tried to compile a program in my iPad which runs iOS 5.1.1. Installing the gcc is quite straight forward and if you follow a slightly updated version of tootallnate’s guide you will easily get to the point of having gcc (get the iOS 5.0 sdk instead of 4.3 mainly). The problem is that Apple changed iOS 5 to run only signed apps and this renders most of the existing configure scripts useless.