ISA 2006 - publishing two sites with one external address

[pantscat]

Hi all,

 

In all my 9 or so years involvement with IT I've only dabbled with ISA very briefly... so I turn to your collective genius for help!

 

I've got two servers - Server1 which hosts ISA and Exchange, and Server2 which hosts Sharepoint (on port 28827 strangely enough).

 

I want to make Sharepoint and OWA available externally through the same public web address - let's call it external.mydomain.com.

 

I've got an ISA publishing rule that allows access to OWA so that "https://external.mydomain.com/exchange" will access OWA on Server1.

 

I can't figure out how to get requests for "https://external.mydomain.com/SP" to forward to Server2 which hosts my SharePoint instance.

 

Is it possible to do this?

 

Can anyone give me a few pointers?

 

Ta,

 

Ant

[SYNACK]

I would probably be easier and more relyible to get a second external subdomain (which should be free) and use this to differentiate, this also makes it easier to split it off to a seporate ip/server if it ever needs to be moved.

 

I have had a look and it does not look like link translation will allow you to translate a folder to a different host entirely just folders on the same host. The listener rules also do not apear to have the ability to be filtered to a single folder either. There may be a way to do it but I can't imagine that it will be a recommended setup as it does not really follow the http protocol spec doing so. You would need an entirely seporate http server engine that interpreted the requests and reverse proxied the requests back to the individual servers.

 

You may be able to do this by setting Apache up on one of the servers, pointing ISA at that and then setting Apache up to reverse proxy each of the internal sites back to the ISA server. You can also use SSO or a wildcard SSL cert to get around the one cert per external ip issue if that effects you.

 

I would recomment just grabbing another subdomain on your existing domain name as this will be orders of magnitude less hassle in the long and short term.

Edited October 15, 2008 by SYNACK

[apearce]

I've found it very easy to publish several sites through a single domain name through ISA06. At the moment I have at least 5 different servers/websites being published through the same URL and listener.

 

I'm glad you got OWA published as this mean the listener is working fine for authentication for both.

 

Create yourself a new rule - and publish your SharePoint Server address sharepointserver:28827. Make sure the ISA box can view the website through IE.

 

If you look at the Path tab of OWA you will see that there are some link exchange/*, owa/*, oab/* etc. SharePoint is just /* so it look at the root. This is because it needs to load the web.config from the root for example

https://external.mydomain.com/web.config and other folders such as the _layouts folder which is published as https://external.mydomain.com/_layouts.

 

In the rules area of ISA you need to make sure that the order is correct for the sites to work. You want SharePoint second last. So rule 1 is Exchange, rule 2 is SharePoint and rule 3 is your denied rule.

 

This is because if you go to https://external.mydomain.com/exchange and your sharepoint rule is 1st with its /* it will look at SharePoint for it and give you a 404 error. Make SharePoints last and if you have created a rule with a selected path with eportal/* it will forward it to the server in the rule instead of going anywhere near sharepoint.

 

 

I hope this helps

 

A.

[pantscat]

Aha! Fan-bloomin-tastic!

 

It was the rule order (and as an aside the host-header forwarding) that was causing problems...

 

Thank you Mr Pearce... you're a gent.

 

Ant