Tech Update: Facilities Manager Server Certificate Changes

Print Audit changed its web server certificates to use SHA-2 on April 7th, 2016.

What changed and when?

ICE software installed on older Windows operating systems may generate the following error:
ICE was unable to verify your license: Soap call “VerifyLicense” failed. Error: Unexpected error occurred: 12175.

This error occurs whenever the ICE software is unable to properly authenticate to the Facilities Manager server.

For computers with Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 or better, you won’t notice any change. Support for SHA-2 based certificates is already built into these operating systems. For older versions of Windows, you will need to verify that they have the required hotfix or service patch to use SHA-2 based certificates.

Windows XP – requires SP3.

Windows Server 2003 – requires SP1 or SP2 and Microsoft Hotfix 938397.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/938397

If these aren’t applied, the computer may be unable to validate the certificate when connecting to any web site using SHA-2 based certificates for SSL (secure HTTP).

For additional information regarding SHA-2 compatible operating systems and web browsers, please visit the following site: https://www.digicert.com/sha-2-compatibility.htm

Why the change?

Many websites use an algorithm called SHA-1 in signing their security certificates but this technology is nearly 20 years old. SHA-1 is being phased out officially by companies such as Microsoft and Google. Print Audit, in keeping with industry-wide best practices, has upgraded our security certificates to use the newer and more secure SHA-2.