Smoothwall & NLB Connection Broker

[Badaz52]

Hi,

 

We are using smoothwall and it is working perfectly with our single terminal server 2008 R2 to provide connectivity to staff at home. Our smoothwall is setup with a forward rule of:

 

Source port 60000 Destination port 3389 external ip any internal ip "internal ip of our rds server"

 

We have recently added a second terminal server and are trying to load balance between the two. We can get it working fine internally with no problems at all but of course the issues arise when we try it from outside. The first connection is OK as it is sending it to our first server which smoothwall has a port forward rule to recognise, it is the second connection that is the issue because when it tries to forward it on to the other server it loses the connection.

 

Is there anyway around this without having to add a second port forward rule to make this second server visible from the internet? I have looked into token redirection in session host but not sure whether this is the right way to do it.

 

If anyone has managed to make this work through smoothwall please could you let me know how you did it? I have also tried adding duplicate port forward rules to load balance through smoothwall but this doesn't work either.

 

Thanks

[john]

Have you not got the TS Load Balancer internally? That way you point people at the balancer and it sorts it out for itself I believe but maybe I misunderstood how that works?

[kmount]

I'd set up an RDS Gateway with Connection Broker and point your Smoothwall rule to that (using port 443) and it will deal with the load balancing of the internal remote desktop services servers for you.

 

From the outside you hit the RDS Gateway and it deals with which RD server you land on internally.

Edited June 18, 2014 by kmount

[Ephelyon]

Here's a good guide on getting an NLB IP set up on both boxes; you could then just tell SmoothWall to forward to that "virtual IP":

 

Setting up NLB on Windows Server 2008 R2 | bretty.me.uk