UPDATED Jan 4, 2024 – Several people had mentioned they could not get the example code to work. This was because I chose to overflow a text column which only outputs the detailed error messages for SQL Server 2017 and above. I have since updated the code to use a numeric value which has been verified to work on SQL Server 2012 through 2022. Recently, one of my customers considered enabling Trace Flag 3625 on one of their SQL Servers, but they wanted a way to quickly test its functionality beforehand. For those of you that are unfamiliar with that...
Continue reading...Security
Get Certificate Details for SQL Encryption In-Transit Using PowerShell – UPDATED
In a previous blog post, I showed you how to use PowerShell to retrieve the details of the certificate being used for encryption-in-transit, aka TLS encryption. I have received a lot of feedback about that script and one of the most common requests was how to run it remotely. I have finally modified the script to do just that. The previous version required you to run it locally on a server. It would return the certificate information for each SQL instance that it detected. The new version can be run remotely, but it will expect you to pass in a...
Continue reading...Get Certificate Details for SQL Encryption In-Transit Using PowerShell
There is an updated version of this script here. In my opinion, all customers should be encrypting connections to their SQL Servers to secure data in-transit, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today, I wanted to discuss how you can use PowerShell to lookup details on the certificate being used for that encryption. For this example, we have three SQL Server instances each configured slightly different for encrypted communication. Using the SQL Server Configuration Manager, we can see the first instance is configured to use a certificate named “deathstar.govlab.corp (SHA256)”. The FORCE ENCRYPTION option is set to YES to...
Continue reading...Create a Whitelist for SQL Server – UPDATED!!!
A while back, I posted an article about creating a WhiteList for access to SQL Server. Since then I have received a bit of feedback that it was not working as designed. My apologies for taking so long, but I believe I have come up with a fix. The main issue is the trigger will block some or even all access to the server after it’s created. As it turns out, the issues were really permission being denied. To see it in action, let’s create everything using the original code from here. We’ll add 1 row to the WhiteList table...
Continue reading...Create a Whitelist for SQL Server
UPDATED – May 16, 2017 – Please review the updated code here. In my previous post, Configuring the Azure SQL Database Firewall, I discussed how you can configure the firewall rules to manage access to the SQL Server. Today, I wanted to demonstrate how you can accomplish the same thing with your on-premise SQL Servers by creating a whitelist. So let’s start off by defining “whitelist”. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, it is “a list of people or organizations that have been approved to receive special considerations”. In our example, that “special consideration” is access to the SQL Server only if...
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