ISA Server

[sidewinder]

j17 thats what I like about ISA server - there is an excellent book by Tom Shinder which goes into an amazing amount of detail and its good to have that amount of reference available without having to go searching or rely on forums - especially in an emergency

 

I know you dont need Linux knowledge for the pre built proxies but as soon as something was to go wrong Im guessing it would be a massive advantage? As I assume asking for help on Linux forums (or here) would bring suggestions of command line stuff

 

I will definately learn Linux properly at some point in the near future though, as I would like to try out so many apps that run on it

 

Btw on the cost of ISA - when we bought 2004 the educational price was extremely good compared to the RRP. Even the RRP makes it a much cheaper solution than a hardware firewall but obviously a lot more expensive than Linux

[srochford]

^ Thats how i learned linux, that and like I've mentioned it's *extremely* well documented. I dare say if you're willing to pay for books MS is better documented but if you're just browsing the web looking for info it's linux all day long.

 

Plus you don't need to learn any linux to use the pre-built proxes, and i honestly mean it; put cd in, follow onscreewn instrucions (hostname, ip address, the usual) and away you go.

 

I think there's a certain category of people for whom the docs available for Linux are good and then there's people like me who find them an absolute nightmare! All too often, you find stuff which just reproduces the man pages or something similar - screen after screen descending pretty much into BNF descriptions of the options when a few simple examples could make it much clearer.

 

Of course you can just use a pre-built proxy but once you want to do more then you have to understand more of what's going on. The same is pretty much true of ISA server; it's all GUI and wizard driven but using more complex features needs more learning.

 

You don't need to spend money on books for MS software; Tom Shinder was mentioned for his book on ISA server - his web site contains a mass of info which can help.

 

MS ISA obviously costs more than (say) Squid on Linux/Unix but it's not a huge amount of money; certainly the hours I spent trying to get Squid working in the way I wanted cost far more than just buying another copy of ISA server (but I did want to try and understand more about Unix type software so I persevered!)