Certificate Autoenrollment Not Working on Windows 7

Why do I always seem to find the weird issues?

I was working with a client on a PKI deployment and ran into an issue of a Windows 7 workstation not autoenrolling properly.  The new Windows Server 2008 R2 PKI was fine, the client simply wouldn’t update.

I went to manually request the desired certificate, and found that the Root CA was not trusted, and therefore the client wouldn’t autoenroll.  Of course, the Root CA and the Issuing CA were properly registered in AD, so the client should’ve auto-downloaded the root certificates for them as part of the autoenrollment process.

I verified the client had autoenrollment enabled as described in this article: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3048.aspx

I also removed the AEDirectoryCache registry entry as described here:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456981.aspx#ECAA (For XP, but the registry key removal is still valid for 7)

What I found then is that the AEDirectoryCache registry key was not be recreated when gpupdate /force is run.  There were no event log entries for autoenrollment at all (good or bad).  No Root CAs were downloaded, and I still didn’t get my certificate.

I ran certutil –pulse to force autoenrollment and got the following unusual message…

CertUtil: -pulse command FAILED: 0x80070002 (WIN32: 2)
CertUtil: The system cannot find the file specified.

That led me to this forum posting: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/winserverDS/thread/5100f13d-f9e6-46fb-a394-76b7f9702c80

The symptoms described there were exactly what I had (though for Vista), so I looked into the resolutions posted.  I couldn’t do the first one, since there were no child tasks.  I’m on to something now…

I copied the entire c:\Windows\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows directory from a good system to the problem system, then went back into Task Scheduler.  Still no child tasks.  I also noticed this time that that Task Scheduler gave me an error about failing to connect to the remote system.  Then it hit me, what if the Task Scheduler service was disabled?  Went to look and found out that the Task Scheduler service DID NOT EXIST!!

I exported the registry key for the service (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Schedule) from a good system and imported it to the problem system, rebooted and I now had a running Task Scheduler service again, complete with child tasks.  Also, my root certificates auto-downloaded, and I got my certificate!  Also, certutil –pulse works fine again, and the AEDirectoryCache key was re-created.

So I learned that, somehow, the certificate autoenrollment process in Vista and Windows 7 is connected to the Task Scheduler service.

Managing Malware Inspection Temporary Storage in TMG 2010

A very handy (and under-documented) feature of TMG 2010 is the ability to adjust some of the temporary storage settings for the Malware Inspection feature.  If you are experiencing slow downloads - particularly of larger files - in TMG with Malware Inspection on, you may want to adjust some these settings.  I won't go into details on each setting, but I wanted to share the link to the TechNet documentation.

FIM 2010 UnicodePwd Issue on New AD User Creation

UPDATE 2010.08.17 – Ultimately, 2008 SP1 did not resolve the issue in this case.  We ended up enabling Password Policy Enforcement in FIM 2010 SSPR.  This change alters how FIM connects to AD to make password changes on new user creation, password sync, and password reset operations.  Instead of Kerberos, it uses LDAPS to the domain controller.  Together with a hotfix for the AD MA used, it now enforces the full AD password policy (including password history).

----

Now this was a an odd one. I am working on a pretty basic FIM deployment and got to the point of provisioning users into Active Directory. I set up all of my attribute flows in Outbound Sync Rules and set up my workflows and MPRs accordingly. At this point, I was flowing a static string value to unicodePwd – one that did meet the password requirements of the domain – and it was configured for “Initial Flow Only”. The user gets created in Active Directory, but I was getting a “Cd-Error” in FIM with no real detail, other than the fact that userAccountControl was not being updated to 512 (for an enabled, regular user).  No errors in the event logs on the FIM Sync server or the target domain controller.  Using the account used by my AD MA, I opened ADUC and tried to enable the user.  No luck.  I got the error message about the password not meeting the policy requirements.  I could however manually set the password to the value I was flowing from FIM, and then I could enable the user.  So that told me it wasn’t an AD rights issue, and that for some reason FIM wasn’t flowing the password to the new user at all.

After looking into all of the more common Kerberos issues (time sync, firewalls, DNS name resolution, etc.) I used Wireshark to capture the network traffic on the FIM Sync server during the export to AD.  The capture showed that the KPASSWD command was failing with “KRB5KDC_ERR_S_PRINCIPAL_UNKNOWN”.

The details of the error showed that the DC could not locate the SPN “kadmin/changepw”.

But, running “setspn –Q kadmin/changepw” returned the correct AD account, “krbtgt”, without issue.  A little bit of searching led me to this KB article, which mentions an issue with “kadmin/changepw” when the “krbtgt” account was authoritatively restored in the past.  Though I didn’t catch it right away, it even says that this would cause an issue with ILM setting passwords on newly provisioned accounts.

So, I ran “repadmin.exe /showobjmeta DC1 cn=krbtgt,cn=users,dc=domain,dc=com” and lo and behold, the “krbtgt” account had been authoritatively restored in 2008.  A sample of the output is below.  Note the highlighted attribute versions that have been increased by 100,000.

 

Loc.USN                           Originating DSA  Org.USN  Org.Time/Date        Ver Attribute

=======                           =============== ========= =============        === =========

  14299      aa8e4db6-7d0e-45ae-95e9-82db0e59a327  34567640 2008-08-19 03:02:35 100001 objectClass

  14299               Default-First-Site-Name\DC1     14299 2010-12-04 18:12:51      1 cn

  14299      aa8e4db6-7d0e-45ae-95e9-82db0e59a327  34567640 2008-08-19 03:02:35 100002 description

  14299      aa8e4db6-7d0e-45ae-95e9-82db0e59a327  34567640 2008-08-19 03:02:35 100001 instanceType

  14299      2f2a1f4c-eac1-404a-b305-37fd2e28eddf      1479 2002-03-13 20:27:04      1 whenCreated

So, the hotfix from the KB article was installed on the DCs, and the issue was resolved.  The hotfix is included in Server 2008 R2 SP1, so definitely go that route if you can.  New users provision with the proper password and are properly enabled on creation.  Hopefully you don’t run into this issue, but if you do, I hope this eases your pain.

Office 2010 x64 and SharePoint Datasheet Views

It turns out that you cannot switch a SharePoint list to Datasheet View if you are running Office 2010 x64.  The required components are not part of the Office 2010 x64 install.  Various postings had you verify if Access was installed.  I didn't have it installed, added it, and still couldn't switch to Datasheet View.  To add the required components, simply install the 2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components.

IE9 RTM and Citrix ICA files

I ran various IE9 betas and RCs without issue when it came to opening and launching Citrix ICA files.  Once I installed the RTM version however, they failed to open.  The file would download, and then just sort of hang.  If I went to the site with Firefox, I had no issues.  Today I learned that to resolve this, you simply need to uninstall "Citrix online plug-in - web", and then reinstall the web client when prompted through your Citrix portal.  Much better now...