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

Reading the client logfiles


Both Windows 7 and Windows 8 have tools which can generate some very helpful logfiles when troubleshooting a DirectAccess connection. In Windows 7, it is named the DirectAccess Connectivity Assistant (DCA), and is a systray program that you have to install. In Windows 8, it is named the Network Connectivity Assistant (NCA) and is now baked right into Windows, so you don't have to install anything. This NCA shows up in the list of Network Connections that appears when you click on your networking icon, the same place you would go in Windows 8 to view your available Wi-Fi connections. Whichever operating system you have and therefore whichever tool you are using, the logs generate a lot of the same information. Both logfiles are really just a collection of commands that are run, and the results stored, in one big file. You can certainly use these commands manually on a one-by-one basis if you are trying to gather some specific information, rather than look over...