I used to think that wanting to restore cache files from a previous ISA firewall installation would be a waste of time. The reasoning was that the cache files would repopulate themselves as users visit Web sites after the installation takes place. But the fact is that if you have a very large cache configuration, it could take quite a while to repopulate the entire cache, and you’ll suffer from the performance and bandwidth hits you get when the Web cache becomes depopulated. For this reason, I’ve changed my opinion and believe that restoring the old cache file(s) from the previous configuration is a good thing. The default setting after reinstalling the ISA firewall software is to delete the old cache files. Since this isn’t what we have in mind, we need to prevent this from happening. Perform the following steps beginning before you begin the reinstallation process:
- Copy of the existing cache file, located in <drive:>\urlcache\Dir1.cdat to another location. You may need to create multiple copies if you have cache files on multiple drives
- Reinstall the ISA firewall software.
- After installation is complete, configure cache settings in the same way they were previously configured.
- Stop all the ISA firewall’s services, by typing net stop fweng at a command prompt.
- Copy the Dir1.cdat file to the \urlcache folder for each drive that has a cache file.
- Restart all the ISA firewall’s services
HTH, Tom Thomas W Shinder, M.D. Site: www.isaserver.org Blog: http://blogs.isaserver.org/shinder/ Book: http://tinyurl.com/3xqb7 MVP — ISA Firewalls .