Welcome to Jim Harrison's Section

Jim Harrison, a retired Navy Electronics Technican, joined the the ISA Server Sustained Engineering team as a QFE tester in Jan 2003. He was introduced to ISA server when he joined the NetDocs group as an infrastructure tester. After overviewing the MS ISA server deployment and infrastructure topology, he became encouraged to design the ISA deployment and setup for NetDocs, and is now an avid ISA server supporter and systems implementer. He spent an additional year with the Subscription Platform Group's Security test team before joining his beloved product's team.

As a known authority of ISA Server's vast enterprise configuration options, Jim consults for various Microsoft groups on proper deployment and installation of the product. Currently, Jim is engaged in different test projects designing integrated solutions for Microsoft's intra- and extranets.

He answers to his wife, daughter, son and daughter-in-law and his Microsoft Managers (in that order, of course).

Jim's Latest Offerings

WinsockTool

Ever tried to test your ISA setup but you had to use the application (like Exchange, DNS, Terminal Services, etc.) to do the testing? How are you suposed to tell the difference between application behavior and network behavior? It's not easy, even if you know how to read network traffic with a packet sniffer.

Enter WinsockTool. It's a VB6 application that uses the Microsoft Winsock control to allow you to test UDP or TCP protocols on any port. Install one the internal client (or even ISA itself, if that's the test focus) and on another host outside of ISA. Set them to use each other's address on the same protocol and port and you can commnicate between them if the path is clear. If you can use the chat function (really useful when testing globally), then the primary path is clear.

It's only supported on NT4, Win2K and later.

ISA Server Tools Repository

The ISA Server scripts and tools site is a collection o tools and helpful tips provided by me and many others. Where possible, I tried to give credit to the author(s), but not every file gives me that information. If I have one of your tools on my site and didn't give proper credit, please contact me so I can clean up the page.

Jim's Latest Contributions

Jim Harrison's Latest Contributions

14120 Errors; Discussion and Solution: Date - Jun 21, 2002; Section - Articles; THe dreaded 14120 error; it's caused much grief in the ISA Server community. What is it and what can be done about it? All theses and more will be answered in tomorrow's Jerry Springer show, but for now, you can read this article...
Designing An ISA Server Solution on a Complex Network.: Date - May 16, 2002; Section - Tutorials / Installation & Planning; Designing An ISA Server Solution on a Complex Network.
ISA Clients - Part 3: The Firewall Client.: Date - Dec 19, 2001; Section - Tutorials / Configuration - General; This article deals with the specifics of ISA and client configuration for the Firewall Client-enabled host.
ISA Clients - Part 1 : General ISA Server Configuration.: Date - Nov 06, 2001; Section - Tutorials / Configuration - General; This article discusses the particulars of ISA configuration to support each client type; SecureNAT, Web Proxy And Firewall.
ISA Clients - Part 2: SecureNAT and Web Proxy Client.: Date - Nov 06, 2001; Section - Tutorials / Configuration - General; This article deals with the setup and configuration of SecureNAT and Web Proxy clients
DNS for ISA Server.: Date - Sep 11, 2001; Section - Tutorials / Installation & Planning; Want some more fun? Let’s look at the ISA scenario. What many folks will do is place DNS resolver IPs in both NICs, ISP in the external, local in the internal. While this seems to make sense, it’s actually very inefficient and you can actually cause huge timeouts this way. Remember that TCP/IP will choose the route for a given packet based on its destination, not where it found the data. This means that DNS entries are not really NIC-specific, it’s just more meaningful to the person entering them.
Configuring ISA Server Dial-up Connections.: Date - May 04, 2001; Section - Tutorials / Configuration - General; Using ISA over a dial-up connection is fraught with pitfalls, mainly because the dial-up connection is fundamentally different from a permanent connection.
Configuring ISA Server Interface Settings.: Date - Apr 30, 2001; Section - Tutorials / Installation & Planning; 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.