Book Image

Microsoft DirectAccess Best Practices and Troubleshooting

By : Jordan Krause
Book Image

Microsoft DirectAccess Best Practices and Troubleshooting

By: Jordan Krause

Overview of this book

DirectAccess is an amazing Microsoft technology that is truly the evolution of VPN; any Microsoft-centric shop needs this technology. DirectAccess is an automatic remote access solution that takes care of everything from planning to deployment. Microsoft DirectAccess Best Practices and Troubleshooting will provide you with the precise steps you need to take for the very best possible implementation of DirectAccess in your network. You will find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions from administrators and explore unique troubleshooting scenarios that you will want to understand in case they happen to you. Microsoft DirectAccess Best Practices and Troubleshooting outlines best practices for configuring DirectAccess in any network. You will learn how to configure Manage Out capabilities to plan, administer, and deploy DirectAccess client computers from inside the corporate network. You will also learn about a couple of the lesser-known capabilities within a DirectAccess environment and the log information that is available on the client machines. This book also focuses on some specific cases that portray unique or interesting troubleshooting scenarios that DirectAccess administrators may encounter. By describing the problem, the symptoms, and the fixes to these problems, the reader will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the way DirectAccess works and why these external influences are important to the overall solution.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Microsoft DirectAccess Best Practices and Troubleshooting
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

NIC binding


To set this, while you are in the Network Connections screen, press the Alt key on your keyboard to bring up the menus on top of the window. Then head over to the Advanced menu and click on Advanced Settings… This will open the Adapters and Bindings section, and here we want to make sure that your Internal NIC is listed first, and that your External NIC is listed second. So, click on the names of the adapters, and use the arrows on the right side of the screen to move them up and down. If you have more NICs in your server, we don't necessarily care about the rest, as long as Internal is first, and External is second.

In fact, personally, I always disable any NICs on the system that are not in use by DirectAccess. Many folks come into preparing their server for DirectAccess thinking of it like a firewall, and on a firewall having too many NICs is always better than not having enough, but unfortunately DirectAccess cannot take advantage of more than two NICs. Rather, DirectAccess cannot take advantage of more than two "legs". You can do NIC teaming, but you still have the limitation of only working with one Internal and one External leg. So, determine which is your Internal and which is your External, name them, IP them, and bind them appropriately, and then you can go ahead and simply disable all of the rest of your NICs. This is not required, but I consider it a best practice in accordance with the idea of disabling anything that is not needed on a networking device.

Note

Many Network Cards now come with a feature named Receive Side Scaling (RSS). This setting is often beneficial to a DirectAccess server and should be enabled on your NICs. It is likely to be already enabled by default, but if you want to check, you can head back into the NIC properties and click on the Configure… button. Head into the Advanced tab and look for the RSS settings that are particular to your NIC.