Tutorials

In the past I have read a lot about VPN users having problems accessing internal resources which are also published on the same ISA server. I had never fully understood those problems because I had never experienced them myself. Recently I was lucky to see the problem with my own eyes and investigate it further. Now, I would like to share a nice workaround to that problem.

As we all know, ISA Server 2004 is a firewall and its function is to block all unnecessary traffic. But sometimes it is also necessary to bypass the traffic without going through the ISA Server. The following section will explain the options available on ISA Server 2004 and on the client side to achieve this.

Having problems connecting to SSL sites that use an alternate port number? No problem! Check out this article for an explanation of the problem and a quick fix.

I’m a big proponent of the SMTP relay concept. A properly configured SMTP relay can protect your Exchange Server by preventing untrusted SMTP servers on the Internet from directly communicating with your Exchange server. An SMTP relay doesn’t require a significant amount of system resources and you can install the IIS SMTP service without incurring the resource or security overhead you would have if you installed the IIS W3SVC (World Wide Web service).In this article we’ll go over some of the important details you need to consider before rolling out an SMTP relay to complement your ISA 2004 firewall e-mail protection design.

A much asked question on the message boards is how to pass an IPSec VPN client through the ISA Server. It can be done if and only if the IPSec implementation supports a feature called NAT Traversal. If you want to know why, how it works and how you can pass it through ISA Server, read on.

Have you ever seen the “Internal Server Error” telling your that the “target principle name” was incorrect? What’s up with that? The answer is that you need to fix up your SSL bridging configuration. Check out this article to find out what causes the problem and how to fix it.

As an ISA Server administrator, I’m sure you are quite aware of the need for service data. After all, good data helps you make wise configuration and performance management decisions. ISA Server helps you collect data in a number of different ways, and in this tutorial, we will focus on ISA Server log files, which can be an easy way to gather information about ISA Server performance and usage. Combined with reporting, log files can be highly effective.

Before you install ISA, you have to properly set up the networking properties for that machine. Mistakes made either during or after installing ISA server can render your once proud server unresponsive.