Author: Jeffrey Bostoen

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iTop freelancer

I’m often asked about what kind of services I offer as a freelancer.

Besides selling iTop extensions, you can also contact me for freelance iTop help:

  • Installating and upgrading.
    I can set up iTop for you on a new or existing Ubuntu Server. If needed, I’ll install Apache and MySQL. Or bring your outdated instance up to date.
  • Implementation.
    I can advise how to set up and use iTop properly.
  • Datamodel customization.
    The default iTop comes with a lot of predefined classes. However, you may need new ones; or want to add or remove some fields.
  • Training.
    As an experienced iTop user, I can guide both regular users and administrators through iTop.
  • Mail to Ticket Automation.
    Aside from tweaking the mail flow, I’m also very familiar with setting up OAuth 2.0 in iTop. This is needed for Microsoft Office 365 mailboxes if iTop needs to read the contents or send e-mail.
  • Integration.
    With the powerful REST API which heavily relies on JSON, it’s easy to query or manipulate iTop data.
    Webhooks allow you to send data from iTop to another application, or perform certain actions.
  • Custom extensions.
    You may need very specific extensions or workflows. Let’s discuss them.
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Microsoft ADFS – Event ID 381

When the Active Directory Federation Services service fails to start because certificates were revoked or have been expired: in best case it’s expired. All internet solutions suggest to run cmdlets. This fails, because the service isn’t started.

The error message points to Could not connect to net.tcp://localhost:1500/policy . The supposed solution? Making sure the ADFS service is running. See the irony here?

What worked in my case: changing the time of the virtual machine to be in the past. Since it was an Azure machine, I had to disable two services: win32time and Hyper-V Time Synchronization. Then, I could change the date to something in the past and I finally managed to get ADFS running. On Google Cloud, I recently encountered the same issue. I also disabled win32time, all Google-related services (bit of an overkill), quickly changed time and managed to get ADFS running.

You could perhaps obtain more info from the SQL or WID database > ADFS > ServiceSettings, which contained the thumbprints in my case.

Hint: you can open the WID database with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).
Connection string:
np:\.\pipe\MICROSOFT##WID\tsql\query
You should be able to authenticate using the machine’s local admin account.

Then I changed the date/time to the real world time again and ran Update-ADFSCertificate -urgent with success.