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

What happens when NLS is offline?


Let's start with one of the craziest situations that can happen in a DirectAccess environment. This one is particularly nutty because when it happens, the symptoms that you experience are for your computers INSIDE the office, while your remote workforce continues to function normally. The NLS is the mechanism by which all of your DirectAccess client computers validate when they are inside the network. It is a very simple requirement (just a website), but if anything goes wrong with the validation of that website, crazy stuff happens. Any DirectAccess client computer that is sitting inside the office will not realize that it is inside the office, and will continue to leave the NRPT enabled, which results in all corporate DNS requests attempting to resolve themselves to the DirectAccess server's external interface, which isn't routable because the user is inside the network.

Note

There have been rare occasions where you can actually connect to DA from inside...