DBA Wiz

Certification authority (CA) is an entity in a network, which manages security credentials and public keys for message encryption. It issues certificates that confirm the identity and other attributes of a certificate in relation to other entities. Depending on the public key infrastructure implementation, a certificate includes the owner’s name, the owner’s public key, information about the public key owner, and the expiry date of the certificate.

Event Viewer is an administrative utility that displays the event logs of a computer. In Event Viewer, events are categorized as follows:
Error: Events in this category show a significant problem, such as loss of data or loss of functionality.
Warning: Events in this category are not necessarily significant but may indicate a possible problem in future.
Information: Events in this category describe the successful operation of an application, driver, or service.
Success Audit: Events in this category show an audited security access attempt that succeeds.
Failure Audit: Events in this category show an audited security access attempt that fails.

The secedit command is a command-line tool that is used to configure and analyze security of a database. The syntaxes of using the secedit command are as follows:
secedit /configure/db/cfg/overwrite/areas/log/quiet This syntax is used to configure the security.
secedit /analyze /db/cfg/overwrite/log/quiet This syntax is used to analyze the security.
The parameters used with the above command are as follows:
/db: It provides the path to the database that contains security template.
/cfg: It specifies the path to the security template that contains default security settings.
/overwrite: It is used to empty the database during the process of importing the security template.
/areas: It specifies the areas where the security is to be applied. If this argument is not specified, all security settings in the security database are applied to the system.
/log: It specifies a file that is used to log the status of the configuration process.
/quiet: It specifies that the configuration or the analysis process should take place without prompting a user.

There are following three logs that can be viewed with Event Viewer:
System log: It is used to record events logged by the Windows operating system components. For example, the failure of a driver or other component of the system to load during startup is recorded in the system log.
Security log: It is used to record security events, such as failed login attempts. This helps to track changes to the security system and identify possible breaches to security. As an example, attempts to log on to the system may be recorded in the security log, depending on the audit settings in the User Manager. Only members of the sysadmin fixed server role can view the security log.
Application log: It is used to record events that are logged by applications. For example, a database application might record a file error in the application log.