Checking certificate expiration with PowerShell

Had an idea to write some (PowerShell) script which will check and maybe notify me of certificates that are nearing expiration for a bunch of (public) sites that… somewhat matter to me. 😊

As it turns out, someone already had this idea and wrote very nice PowerShell script that does just that, available here – thank you!

While testing it, there were sites on which the script worked just fine, and there were sites on which I got errors like this one (Error: “String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.”):

Seems to be connected to my regional settings (I know… who would ever use hr-HR instead of en-US, but… 😊) and date/time formatting:

I’ve tried to fix it in a couple of ways, but the one that finally did it (for me) was explained on Dan Sheehan’s blog (thanks!), implemented on lines 25-26 below.

So, my adapted script looks like this (and works with my hr-HR culture):

It provides the following output (which can be further customized per your needs, of course… and I know – need to insert some line breaks, convert output to HTML, send it via e-mail, … it’s a start! 😊):

Note that I’m returning expiration date “the Croatian way”, by using the following formatting:

Hope it helps someone (and #kudos to original authors)!

Cheers!

Figuring out your public IP address with PowerShell

Sometimes, you need to know your public IP address because of… reasons. My particular reason was creating firewall rule to limit SSH only from my current public IP address, to a machine on the Internet. And how to do it?

You can always use free services like What Is My IP?, which shows you your public IP address in a nice form:

But there are also other ways – if you’re running Linux (or WSL) and do a Google search for the command that can help you, you’ll probably get this (https://askubuntu.com/questions/95910/command-for-determining-my-public-ip?noredirect=1&lq=1):

And if you’re using Windows, PowerShell is here to help you! I like “oneliners”, even if they are not always easy to read:

I’m sure that my friend Aleksandar (PowerShell guru & Microsoft MVP) has a better way, but for me, this works just fine. 🙂

Hope it helps!

Cheers!