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

Planning for Certificates (PKI)


Certificate planning is traditionally the most confusing aspect of DirectAccess for anybody coming into it fresh, and unfortunately, I have spoken to dozens of administrators who tried to create a lab or proof-of-concept for DirectAccess and gave up, because they couldn't figure out what was actually necessary in their Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), or the requirements looked too complicated to be worth their time and the project was abandoned. Don't worry! If you have a Windows Certificate Authority (CA) server in your environment, you meet the requirements. And even if you don't, it is very easy to setup a CA server. I think the worst part about certificates with DirectAccess is figuring out which information is the right information, and knowing what you actually do (and don't) need. Microsoft also recognized this as a problematic area, and so the Server 2012 DirectAccess wizards do allow you to take an extremely simple path to implementation that doesn...