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

Pulls versus pushes


Often when thinking about management functions, we think of them as the software or settings that are being pushed out to the client computers. This is actually not true in many cases. A lot of management tools are initiated on the client side, and so their method of distributing these settings and patches are actually client pulls. A pull is a request that has been initiated by the client, and in this case, the server is simply responding to that request. In the DirectAccess world, this kind of request is handled very differently than an actual push, which would be any case where the internal server or resource is creating the initial outbound communication with the client, a true outbound initiation of packets. Pulls typically work just fine over DirectAccess right away. For example, Group Policy processing is initiated by the client. When a laptop decides that it's time for a Group Policy refresh, it reaches out to Active Directory and says "Hey AD, give me my latest...