Let’s say you know the thumbprint of a certificate and want to see if it’s installed. You can go through and check the properties of each certificate, but it’s kind of a pain. You can do it much easier from Powershell.
Open a Powershell prompt and type in
cd CERT:\\
Then type in “ls” and you’ll see your CurrentUser and LocalMachine Stores. From here you can search the entire store with the following command:
Get-ChildItem -Path ‘XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’ – Recurse
(Where XXX is your thumbprint)
This will show you all the certs installed with that thumbprint:
For more detail you can use Format-List:
Get-ChildItem -Path ‘XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’ – Recurse | Format-List -Property *
Also, You can also view thumbprints of all your certificates by listing them here. For instance to show all your local certs:
ls .\\CurrentUser\My
This is just one of many ways Powershell can make your life easier. While the MMC snapin works well, it’s usually faster just to do what you can from the Powershell prompt.
Are you an IIS Administrator? Do you want to be? Check out my new IIS Administration Fundamentals course at Pluralsight! – J
