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Posts Tagged ISA
Thanks to ISA and TMG teams
Posted by Kent in ISA, Personal Thoughts, TMG on September 12, 2012
I just want to take this opportunity to say thanks to everyone that over the years have worked with ISA and TMG. Having myself worked with ISA and TMG since beta of ISA 2000 I can only say… You all did a fantastic job, making ISA and TMG one the best firewalls on the market. Thank you!
Issues when Migrating from ISA to TMG
Migrating from ISA to TMG is in some case quite easy, but in others it can be quite a jurney. In one of my latest cases it was indeed an interesting jurney…
So let me share some findings with you.
Moving from Standalone ISA to TMG Array.
This does not look to be a problem in theory, but…
Things you can do in a standalone ISA are sometimes not possible in a cluster.
This time it was the use of multiple subnets on a single nic. When moving to NLB you cannot have a VIP from a different subnet.
Found this out when i entered the scene day 1… And this caused the project also needing to do some IP-routing changes in the network.
Migrating Rules
Even though it is possible to export/import configurations in some scenarios. You usually want to take the opportunity to change the rules to take advantage of new features in TMG and also to clean up in the “mess” after adding rules over the years. While doing this kind of migration I have discovered many times that customer tells you one thing and the rules show something else.
You ask the cu…
“Have you made any special settings that we need to consider?”, and cu will answer “No”.
Well what you find in the rules is that a lot of them have “special non-default settings”. And when do you find this out… When users start testing! A little bit to late in other words.
The problem is that it is not a trivial task to check 100 rules in detail in order to grasp how many places have “special settings”.
Active FTP
This cu had a few FTP rules in place. They already knew which ones needed to be cleared from the “Read-Only” flag. They had learned that the hard way in ISA. But they did not know if they also required “Active FTP”. In a TMG cluster you need to “enable” Active FTP on first the enterprise level… And also on the Array level.
NLB and Procurve – Not the best combination
Posted by Kent in ForeFront Edge, ISA, TMG, UAG on February 4, 2011
Using NLB to build TMG (or UAG) clusters is heavily dependent on switches used. HP Procurve has shown to not being “up to the job” in many cases.
After spending the last days helping a customer Migrate from ISA to TMG and trying to figure out how to get NLB to work in their environment I thought i should share some findings.
Unicast or Multicast
It is important to remember that TMG does not care if you use Uni- or Multicast. This is entirely a switch problem. Problem is that many network guys do not know how to pick the right one for the specific switch model at hand.
NLB in Procurve
When using typical Procurve switches (like 2800-series) you will find yourself stuck on using Unicast NLB and also having to add some static MAC-address entries in the environment.
When trying to use Multicast NLB we discovered that HP switches will not let you add Multicast MAC-addresses as static entry’s in many models.
One thing that i noted in this project is total lack of information from HP on how to integrate NLB with there different models.
Why NLB?
Many of you might say… Stop using NLB and get a HW LB instead…
In my opinion NLB should always be the first load balancing you should consider when building TMG and UAG clusters.
Why?… Simply because this is the one integrated into the product. If using any other LB you will not benefit from TMG’s integrated management. Configuring a stand-alone LB to detect service failures in TMG to cause a node-drop is not an easy task. I have also found that when using external LB you will in many cases not be able to use routed relations and will have some serious problems to get bi-directional affinity to work, especially in protocols like RPC.
ISA 2006 SP1 – Released
Finally, it’s here…. ISA 2006 SP1 was released last night.
You find it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D2FECA6D-81D7-430A-9B2D-B070A5F6AE50&displaylang=en
Please read other blogposts here and also at http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2008/05/23/isa-server-2006-service-pack-1-features.aspx for information on all the new stuff in SP1.
Enjoy!
ISA 2006 and SAN Certificates
Many customers and others have been confused by the well spread rumor that ISA 2006 do not support SAN certificates like the ones used by Exchange 2007.
The confusion is often caused by the fact that they do not understand how ISA is using SSL bridging in a typical Exchange Publishing scenario.
You have to remember that SSL bridging means that there are TWO (2) separate SSL sessions going on.
Session 1: From the Client (usually on the Internet) to ISA
In this case the certificate shown by ISA is validated by the client and must satisfy the demands the client has, if no warning is to appear. If the client supports SAN certificates then you can have a SAN certificate in the ISA listener.
Session 2: From ISA to the published server (usually on the Internal network)
In this case the certificate shown by the published server needs to satisfy ISA (the original client has nothing to do with this). This means it has to be issued by a trusted CA and have a Common Name that matches the hostname on the “To” tab in the publishing rule. If this is a SAN certificate, the first SAN also needs to be the same name as the name used on the “To” tab in the publishing rule.
To summarize, ISA 2006 do support SAN certificates, but when acting as a client it can only validate the common name and the first SAN entry. This will change in SP1 (released later this summer), with SP1 ISA will as a client be able to validate any SAN entry to match the “To” used in the publishing rule.
The “great” Jim Harrison, has described this in more detail in his blog at http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2007/08/29/certificates-with-multiple-san-entries-may-break-isa-server-web-publishing.aspx
ISA 2006 SP1 – Traffic Simulator
One of the new interesting features of SP1 is the Traffic Simulator.
Using the Traffic Simulator you will be able to try out your rules to see if they match your intentions.
The Traffic Simulator is a new tab in the Troubleshooting node.
The way it works is that it “injects” the scenario into the actual engine, and therefore we can only run the simulations on a server where firewall service is running. So it’s not possible to do this remote.
The result is in my opinion still a bit “short”. It simply states the result and show the rule causing the result. If I for example have a rule that requires authentication to access internet. The results will be.
1: Traffic sent from this user:
2: Traffic sent from anonymous user:
And as you can see the information you get from the denied is only that it got stuck on the rule, but it is so far up to you to realize that it is because of authentication requirements. I have filed a change request for more info in this case, hopefully it will make it into RTM.
In all this is yet another great new feature of SP1 that i believe many customers have wanted for some time.