How to quickly locate a Microsoft Certificate Authority

Overview

This article covers how to quickly and easily locate a Microsoft Certificate Authority in your Active Directory Domain.

Option 1

Using the Active Directory Users & Computers MMC, search for the ‘Cert Publishers’ group.

Double click ‘Cert Publishers’ in the search results, and you’ve got your answer.

Option 2

From a command prompt, run the following command:

certutil -config - -ping

And again, you’ve got your answer.

certutil -config - -ping
X500DC1.x500.co.uk\X500-CA
Connecting to X500DC1.x500.co.uk\X500-CA ...
Server "X500-CA" ICertRequest2 interface is alive (16ms)
CertUtil: -ping command completed successfully.