Errors and Solutions

This page contains a list of common PowerShell errors and their solutions.

Invoke-WebRequest : The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.

The cause of the error is that PowerShell, by default, uses TLS 1.0 to make https requests. TLS 1.0 has been broken for a long time now and is no longer supported by most websites. You can change this behavior with running any of the below command to use all protocols. You can also specify single protocol.

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = "Tls12"

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls, [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls11, [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12, [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Ssl3

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = "Tls, Tls11, Tls12, Ssl3"

Restart-Computer : Failed to restart the computer COMPUTERNAME with the following error message: A system shutdown is in progress.

12/23/2024

A server this morning wouldn't respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL requests, remote Event Viewer requests, but we were able to access it via remote a PowerShell session. When we issued the Restart-Computer cmdlet, the error response was that a system shutdown is in progress. Suggestions on the web were to kill any lsass and winlogon processes.

Killing the lsass process did the trick this morning and the server rebooted as expected afterwards.

# list all lsass processes
Get-Process -IncludeUserName | Where-Object {$_.ProcessName -Like 'lsass'}

# to actually stop all lsass processes
Get-Process -IncludeUserName | Where-Object {$_.ProcessName -Like 'lsass'} | Stop-Process

#end