Wednesday 20 August 2014

Colour Coding SharePoint 2013 Central Admin Appearance Using Themes

A quick post I'd like to share as I am sure this can be useful for a lot of SharePoint admins.

As you are all probably aware you can change the theme of any SharePoint site from site settings.

Within Central Administration this option just leads to a blank theme gallery.

A problem I face regularly is having multiple server sessions open which include multiple farm central administration pages.

Sometimes I may have Production, Staging and Development Central Administration sessions open while testing and deploying through the environments.

By colour coding these environments it becomes quickly obvious which farm you are now in, and reduces your risk of making a mistake of which environment you are working in.

In my scenario I could also be working on different regional farms, so UK, USA and Asia all have a Production, Staging and Development.... you can forgive the confusion at busy times.

As I said a short and sweet tip that may be of interest to some administrators.

You can also label your Central Adminstration within the top banner and below is a great blog post covering that in detail.

http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-2013-central-administration-productivity-tip

Default colour scheme (Notice the 'Production' label at the top).



To access the themes simply take your Central Admin URL - http://server1:2013/default.aspx

and replace the /default.aspx with /_layouts/15/designgallery.aspx

 http://server1:2013/_layouts/15/designgallery.aspx




Choose a theme to suit this environment and save.







So now I have blue for Production and Orange for Staging, nice and easy to differentiate in a hurry.





Thanks for reading,

Matt

Thursday 7 August 2014

Checking your SSL Key file, CSR and Certificate Match

I have been doing a lot of work around security and in particular SSL with SharePoint this year (you might have noticed from my recent posts!).

This obviously leaves me spending a fair amount of time generating and installing certificates for the various farms and sites.

Recently upon receving my certificate from the certificate generation team I could not generate the required PFX file using OpenSSL.

After looking around in my various folders I noticed I had a lot of old CSR files and Key files knocking around and it becomes difficult to know which is the latest version! (I should be better at housekeeping I know!).

So a colleague passed on to me some useful information to check that your CSR/Key/Cert files match before trying to install them or generate PFX files as this will cause issues.

Using OpenSSL use the below commands to check the modulus of your files and ensure consistency between them.

To check the modulus of the certificate file:

x509 -noout -modulus -in certificatename.crt


To check the modulus of the Key file:

rsa -noout -modulus -in privatekeyname.key


To check the modulus of the CSR file:

req -noout -modulus -in csrname.csr


If you run these commands you will get the modulus printed out and be able to check them against each other to ensure they match and were not generated seperately with a different key etc..


I hope this helps out for those who are generating certificates regularly and have had problems with multiple versions of those certificates!

Matt