Windows Server Essentials 2016 SSL Certificate Renewal Fails

For those supporting Windows Server Essentials 2016 (as the loss of functionality in future versions is a poor show from Microsoft) and your hitting errors trying to renew the certifcate, the issue is that the patches released in April 2022 stopped the Windows Server Essentials Dashboard communicating due to the dashboard using TLS 1.1 and the patch restricting it to TLS 1.2

If you get an error such as “the domain name was not setup for your server. wait a few minutes and run the wizard again” repeatedly, do the following (out of hours as it needs a reboot).

Open Powershell in Admin Mode (the final command is a reboot)

Copy and paste the following lines into Powershell to push the dashboard to use TLS 1.2

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v2.0.50727” -Name “SystemDefaultTlsVersions” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v2.0.50727” -Name “SchUseStrongCrypto” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319” -Name “SystemDefaultTlsVersions” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319” -Name “SchUseStrongCrypto” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v2.0.50727” -Name “SystemDefaultTlsVersions” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v2.0.50727” -Name “SchUseStrongCrypto” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319” -Name “SystemDefaultTlsVersions” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319” -Name “SchUseStrongCrypto” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

Restart-Computer –Force

Once rebooted, works a treat.