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This document and what comes with it are
provided as-is with blunt warning: Use at your own risk,
buyer beware. You break your system; you own the resolution
as well. We have no liability for what you do, or can't
do, or fail to do with this information. Your entire protection
is to start over again with a protected backup, or from
protected system. If you don't want to accept this idea,
please don't use this document.
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Watching the activity on the Microsoft.public.backoffice.smallbiz2000 newsgroup, I see a lot of questions regarding Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA). Unfortunately, many of the resources available online only provide solutions or work-arounds for specific issues, or instructions on what steps to take to get certain functionality, but never go the extra step to explain why those steps work, or how the various pieces fit together and form the big picture. In doing so, those resources neglect one of ISA’s single greatest features: its elegant simplicity. Don’t rub your eyes or check to see if your glasses need cleaned – yes I just described ISA as both elegant and simple. The goal of this paper is to communicate and demonstrate that simplicity – so that administrators will possess a better understanding of how ISA works, which will not only assist them in their duties of maintaining their Small Business Server installation, but it should allow them to better understand and address security issues as well as increase their confidence in ISA.
I will note that I do not purport to be any sort of expert on ISA. I am however, an SBS administrator and consultant who learned what I know of ISA by getting my hands dirty. I’ll admit that I didn’t have the slightest idea how ISA worked when I installed my first SBS – which, thankfully was an internal installation long before I started supporting Small Business Server professionally. One day I was trying to get file sharing for MSN Messenger to work, and for the life of me I could not resolve the issue. I called it a night and went home. The next morning I came in, and had one of those experiences where that last neural connection was made, the lights came on and voila! “So that’s how ISA works!” I immediately wondered why anyone hadn’t written a basic reference that described how simple ISA really was, and how the parts fit together. Hence the idea for this paper was born.
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