Installing ISA Server 2000.
If you have not yet installed ISA Server on your network, this is the article for you. In this article I will walk you through, step-by-step, the installation of ISA Server 2000 onto a computer in your network. We will cover the different types of installations you can perform (either as a stand-alone server or as part of an array of ISA Servers) and discuss the caveats associated with each. Before we get started on the actual installation of ISA Server, there are some things you should do beforehand though:
Some basic information before we get our hands dirty The process of installing ISA Server can be started by inserting ISA Server CD-ROM into your CD drive. Under most cases, the installation program should auto-start and display the screen shown in Figure 1.
If for some reason the installation program doesn’t auto-start, just double click the ISAAutorun.exe file in the root of the CD-ROM as shown in Figure 2.
The Installation and Deployment Guide, as shown in Figure 3 is very good reading before getting started on your installation if you have any questions. We will try to cover most of the basic situations here in this tutorial. If you are migrating from Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0, there is some outstanding migration information available in the Read About Migrating to ISA Server area, as shown in Image 4.
To initialize or not to initialize… Up to this point, you haven’t had to make any decisions…well, the time has come for making a decision, and your first one is big one indeed. If you will be using this ISA Server as an array member, then you must install the ISA Server schema into Active Directory. This is a one-way decision—you cannot undo it later if you change your mind. However, if you want to add additional ISA Servers to the ISA Server array at a later time, you will not have to reinstall the schema changes. In order to make the changes to the schema, you must be a member of the Enterprise Admins and Schema Admins groups. To initialize the schema, click Run ISA Server Enterprise Initialization, which will bring up a dialog box as shown in Figure 5. (Note that this is not your last chance to abort this procedure, as we will see later.)
Like previously mentioned, you will have one more chance to abort the schema initialization process, as shown in Figure 6. There are, however, options on this dialog box that require some discussion, so we will address them before moving any further into the installation.
If you choose to continue the process, you will see two new windows on your machine, shown in Figure 7 and Figure 8 as well as a lot of disk activity for about 2 – 5 minutes (depending on the machine configuration and loading). After the initialization is done, both windows will close out, the dialog box shown in Figure 9 will be displayed, and you are ready to continue the process of installing ISA Server.
Installation time Now that we have done all of our preparatory work, we can now move on to the actual process of installing ISA Server on our machine as follows:
11. On the next window, you must configure the cache size. This option, like most others can be changed after installation is complete. The default setting is for a 100 MB sized cache, and for now we will leave it be. Click OK to continue.
That’s all for now folks… That’s all there is to this process. Installing ISA Server is actually one of the simplest product installations you will perform—provided you have done your research ahead of time. |