Book Image

Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook

By : Erez Ben-Ari, Ran Dolev, Erez Y Ben
Book Image

Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook

By: Erez Ben-Ari, Ran Dolev, Erez Y Ben

Overview of this book

Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) is the latest in a line of Application Publishing (Reverse Proxy) and Remote Access (VPN) Server products. The broad set of features and technologies integrated into UAG makes for a steep learning curve. Understanding all the features and abilities of UAG is a complex task that can be daunting even to experienced networking and security engineers. This book is the first to be dedicated solely to Microsoft Forefront UAG. It guides you step-by-step throughout all the stages of deployment, from design to troubleshooting. Written by the absolute experts who have taken part of the product’s development, official training and support, this book covers all the primary features of UAG in a friendly style and a manner that is easy to follow. It takes you from the initial planning and design stage, through deployment and configuration, up to maintenance and troubleshooting. The book starts by introducing UAG's features and and abilities, and how your organization can benefit from them. It then goes on to guide you through planning and designing the integration of the product into your own unique environment. Further, the book guides you through the process of publishing the various applications, servers and resources - from simple web applications to complex client/server based applications. It also details the various VPN technologies that UAG provides and how to take full advantage of them. The later chapters of the book educate you with common routine “upkeep” tasks like monitoring, backup and troubleshooting of common issues. Finally, the book includes an introduction to ASP, which some of the product's features are based on, and can help the advanced administrator with enhancing and customizing the product.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Whodunnit?


Unlike many other software products, the majority of the problems with UAG are related to the fact that it supports such a wide variety of products. With most other products, the software pops up an error, you look it up in the documentation or knowledge base, and follow the solution, but actually receiving an error message by UAG "itself" is relatively rare. The reason this is the way it is stems from what UAG does. The server has to authenticate the user, then authenticate on behalf of the user to one of dozens of possible backend servers with their authentication mechanism, and then fetch various types of data from that backend server, parse it, and present it to the user. This "data" is almost always a mix of graphics, text, binary objects, code in various languages and more. The content is also often encrypted or protected against tampering in one or more ways, and UAG has to go through all that for every web request and response. Add to that the fact that the user may be...