Renaming ISA Server 2000 and ISA Server 2004 Firewalls
By Chris Gregory
and
Thomas W Shinder M.D.
A common ISA firewall administration task is renaming the firewall. The firewall may need to be renamed because you are moving it from one location to another, or the machine was in a test network and now needs to be moved to a production network, or because the machine is using a name that you want to assign to another machine. Whatever the reason, many ISA firewall administrators want and need to rename the ISA firewall.
The good news is that it’s possible to rename your ISA firewall. It doesn’t matter if the firewall is a member of a domain or a standalone server. However, unless you rename the ISA firewall in the right way, some bad things can happen! There is a very specific procedure you need to go through before you can successfully rename the ISA Server 2000 firewall. In contrast, renaming the ISA Server 2004 firewall is a no-brainer.
In this article we’ll go over the procedures required to rename the ISA Server 2000 and ISA Server 2004 firewalls.
Renaming the ISA Server 2000 Firewall
The basic procedure for renaming the ISA Server 2000 firewall includes the following:
Change the Name of the ISA Server 2000 Firewall Computer
The first step is to rename the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer. Perform the following steps to rename the machine. In this example, the machine is not a member of a domain, but it doesn’t matter, since the steps are the same regardless if the machine is a domain member or not:
- On the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer, right click the My Computer object on the desktop and click Properties.
- In the System Properties dialog box, click the Computer Name tab.
- On the Computer Name tab, click the Change button.
- In the Computer Name Changes dialog box, enter the new name in the Computer name text box. In this example, the old computer name was ISA1 and the new computer name is ISACHANGED. Click OK after changing the name.
- Click OK in the Computer Name Changes dialog box informing you that you must restart the computer before the changes take effect.
- Click OK in the System Properties dialog box.
- Click OK in the System Properties dialog box.
- Click No in the System Settings Change dialog box that asks if you want to restart the computer.
Do not restart the firewall! If you restart the firewall machine, you’ll be very unhappy with the results.
Change the Registry Values
The next step is to change the Registry values. Perform the following steps to change the appropriate Registry values on the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer:
- Click Start and then click the Run command.
- In the Run dialog box, enter Regedit in the Open text box and click OK.
- In the Registry Editor, drill down to the following Registry key:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fpc\Arrays\{CurrentArrayGUID}\Servers\{CurrentServerGUID}
- In the right pane of the Registry Editor you will see two values that have the old name of the ISA Server 2004 firewall. These are the msFPCFQDN and the msFPCName. Double click on each of these values, and then enter the new name in the dialog boxes. In this example, we are changing the name from ISA1 to ISACHANGED.
- Now navigate to the following Registry Key
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fpc\Arrays\{CurrentArrayGUID}\
- Change the values for the msFPRArrayName and the msFPCName entries to the new name. Again, in this example, we are changing the name from ISA1 to ISACHANGED.
- Restart the ISA Server 2000 firewall computer.
You’ll find that after the restart that everything works correctly. The key to success is making the Registry changes before you restart the computer!
Renaming a ISA Server 2004 Firewall
The Microsoft ISA Server team heard the cries from the wilderness and responded by fixing the name changing problem in ISA Server 2004 firewalls. Now you can change the name of the ISA Server 2004 firewall without having to make any Registry edits. Really! Try this and see how it works for you:
- On the ISA Server 2004 firewall computer, right click the My Computer object on the desktop and click Properties.
- In the System Properties dialog box, click the Computer Name tab.
- On the Computer Name tab, click the Change button.
- In the Computer Name Changes dialog box, enter the new name in the Computer name text box. In this example, the old computer name was ISA1 and the new computer name is ISACHANGED. Click OK after changing the name.
- Click OK in the Computer Name Changes dialog box informing you that you must restart the computer before the changes take effect.
- Click OK in the System Properties dialog box.
- Click OK in the System Properties dialog box.
- Click Yes in the System Settings Change dialog box that asks if you want to restart the computer.
After restarting the ISA Server 2004 firewall machine, open the Event Viewer. You will first see a number of failure entries followed by success entries. One of the success entries contains the following information:
Event Type: Information
Event Source: Microsoft ISA Server Control
Event Category: None
Event ID: 21123
Date: 6/14/2004
Time: 1:10:51 PM
User: N/A
Computer: ISACHANGED
Description:
The computer name has changed. FQDN and computer name values were updated.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
I hope you enjoyed this article and found something in it that you can apply to your own network. If you have any questions on anything I discussed in this article, head on over to http://forums.isaserver.org/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=013215#000000 and post a message. I’ll be informed of your post and will answer your questions ASAP. Thanks! –Tom
