Visiting weird ports with Chrome

As a security measure, Chrome doesn’t allow by default to visit any not known web port (eg not 80,443, 8080 etc).

I had to debug site hosted on port 102 so I made the following bat file to fire up Chrome and test the website:

cd "%AppData%\..\Local\Google\Chrome\Application"
chrome.exe --explicitly-allowed-ports=102

Note that AppData lands you to the Roaming profile, while Chrome installs (if you select to install it only on your account) in the Local folder.

Hope this helps.

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.