Installing a Wildcard Certificate Using SBS 2008 Console

I needed to install a wildcard certificate into an SBS 2008 install. After acquiring the wildcard certificate I installed it into the Certificate Store for the Computer Account, into the Personal Certificates as per the instructions found in “How do I import an existing trusted certificate?” – found by opening SBS 2008 Console, clicking on Network, then clicking on the Connectivity tab and then clicking on the Certificate entry under Web Server Certificate.

Once I’d done that, I launched the Add A Trusted Certificate wizard. Problem is it would only show the self-generated certificate for the SBS 2008 install and not the wildcard certificate.

I got to thinking that a setting somewhere was restricting it to the domain and RWW prefix set in the Internet Address Management wizard, so I went hunting and found a solution.

The workaround is to open up regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SmallBusinessServer\Networking.

In here you’ll find the two entries that dictate which certificates are displayed in the Add A Trusted Certificate Wizard – PublicFQDNPrefix and PublicFQDNProvider.

To get a wildcard certificate displayed in the wizard you’ll need to change PublicFQDNPrefix to *.

Make a note of the original value, as you’ll need to put it back once you’ve installed the wildcard certificate.

Now open up the SBS 2008 Console, click on Network, click on the Connectivity tab and run the Add A Trusted Certificate Wizard. You’ll now be able to see the wildcard certificate and install it.

Once you’ve successfully installed the certificate, go back to regedit and change PublicFQDNPrefix from * back to its original value.

Windows 7 Experience Index and VMWare Workstation 7.0

Here’s the WEI for my Lenovo ThinkPad T410 (Core i7-620M, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 128GB 2nd Gen Samsung SSD) running Windows 7 Ultimate with latest drivers from Lenovo and the latest laptopvideo2go.com Modded INF for NVidia’s latest WHQL drivers (197.16) – only installed due to the instabilities with Lenovo’s supplied 188.25 ones.

And here’s the WEI for a Windows 7 Pro VM running inside VMWare Workstation 7.0.

Yes, the VM is running Aero with transparency! Also interesting to note that the host must be performing some VMDK caching for the increased score on the hard drive performance.

With these figures I’m going to be spending more time inside VMs than on the host. I was quite stunned to see how well the Internet Explorer 9 Preview ran – in particular the speed tests - inside the VM.