Monday, March 24, 2014

Windows : Ctrl - Alt - Del on a VM

If you use Remote Desktop a lot and you get a message about your password needing to change, you can't use:

Ctrl - Alt - Del

because that will change the password on your actual PC - not the box you are RDC'ing to.

All the documentation states:

Ctrl - Alt - End

but sometimes that simply doesn't work.

In such cases, in the RDC window, try Start - Run - OSK.

This pops up the On Screen Keyboard.

Than hold down Ctrl and Alt on your actual keyboard and then click Delete on the OSK.

Job done!

Enjoy!



Friday, March 07, 2014

ADFS : Non domain-joined proxy

All our proxies are domain-joined albeit in a different zone.

Recently, I was involved with a client whose proxy was non-domain joined i.e. a workgroup.

When installing the proxy, you need to enter the credentials of the ADFS service account.

Battled to get this to work and then I remembered that this was not domain-joined and consequently, you needed to enter the sAMAccountName in the form:

domain\user
where the domain is the one that ADFS is installed in.

That did the trick.

Enjoy!

Monday, March 03, 2014

OWIN : WS Federation support

Vittorio blogged on this:

Using Claims in your Web App is Easier with the new OWIN Security Components

There's a good reference to OWIN in the above.

WS-Federation in Microsoft OWIN Components–a quick start

But what the article doesn't show is how to display the claims.

Dominick blogged on this:

Test driving the WS-Federation Authentication Middleware for Katana

Horrible hack below - yeah I know! - I put it in the About page in the HomeController ...

public ActionResult About()
{
     ViewBag.Message = "Your application description page.";

     var ctx = Request.GetOwinContext();

     var user = ctx.Authentication.User;
     var response = ctx.Response;

     response.ContentType = "text/html";

     if (user.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
    {
         ... code as above
    }

Enjoy!