In the same way that you can delegate control over Acitve Directory, Exchange, and other Microsoft servers, ISA also supports administrative delegation. By delegating control over your ISA server, you can specify the amount of control your IT staff has over the ISA server(s). Configuring delegation is pretty straightforward, but before we get into ...

Finally! With the release of ISA Server 2004 Service Pack 2 comes support for HTTP compression. HTTP compression is used to reduce file size by using the industry standard GZIP and Deflate algorithms. These algorithms are built into Windows 2000 Server and up, work with Internet Explorer 4.0 and up, as well as any other HTTP 1.1 compliant browser. ...

The Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) allows the transfer of large amounts of data without impacting network performance. It is able to dothis by transferring data in smaller chunks, using unused bandwidth when available, and then reassembling the data when it has all been recieved. One of the most popular uses for BITS is Microsoft ...

One of the new features in ISA 2004 SP2 is Diffserv. Diffserv is a method of packet prioritization that applies to all web traffic passing through an ISA 2004 SP2 Server. Using the Diffserv Web filter, the ISA server can scan the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or domain name and apply packet priority using DiffServ bits. The Diffserv web filter ...

In Part 1 of Using ISA 2004 as a PPTP VPN Server, we went over the server configuration to enable ISA 2004 to act as a VPN server. All that is left is to configure the access rules, and test the connection out! To configure the access rules, open up the ISA 2004 Management MMC, right-click the Firewall Policy node and select New --> Access ...

Setting up a PPTP VPN server on ISA 2004 is easy, requires no Client Access Licences (CALs) and secure. Instead of letting traffic through your firewall to the VPN server and then authenticating, no traffic gets through until the user has authenticated. ISA 2004 also supports Remote Access Quarantine, increasing security even more. ISA 2004 ...

I hate having multiple RDP sessions open to my servers (although the Remote Desktops MMC is nice), so I have installed Adminpak.msi, Exchange System Manager and ISA Server Management on my XP Workstation to cut down on these RDP sessions and make life easier for myself. However, ISA 2004 requires a little configuration in order to get remote ...

Patching workstations and servers has been made a lot easier with the implementation of SUS/WUS/WSUS on your network. In order to update your ISA 2004 Server with your *US server, a new Access Rule must be created. Its a pretty straightforward procedure and we'll start by opening up the ISA Manager MMC, and clicking on Create New Access Rule. ...

Windows Server 2003 SP1 includes a new feature called Remote Access Quarantine. With RAQ you can specify a set of requirements that VPN clients must meet before they are given access to the network. If the client does not meet the requirements you set out, they will be denied access to the network. With network administrators scrambling to ensure ...

FTP Servers support PORT and PASV mode. By default the FTP Server publishing rule in ISA 2004 does not support PASV mode, but we can change this! I have an FTP server set up to transfer files around between my laptop, work PC and between my virtual network and the real network (Virtual Server 2005 NEEDS the Shared Folders feature from VMWare). I ...

Locking down web access is a must in today's IT enviroment. Spyware, Adware, harassment lawuits are among the few things that wide open web access can give you. I know if two businesses that had sexual harrasment lawsuits brought against them due to one employee seeing another employee browsing sites that contained sexual content. Thankfully with ...

A lot of Microsoft server products are using Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) which is based on Microsoft SQL Server technology. ISA 2004 is one of these products. I recently began having an ''issue'' with memory usage on my ISA 2004 and did some digging to find this solution! I was having the following error show up in my application event log and ...

Instant Messenger services are popular and can be quite insecure. As an example, the recent Bropia worm was spread through MSN Messenger forcing a mandatory upgrade of the IM client. For this reason you may wish to block IM traffic and prevent your users from communicating via MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc... Blocking IM traffic is quite easy with ISA ...