mozzy

noted, and thanks. Just reading through the lists now I have some spare time ... a rare commodity in the IT world of Education as i'm sure we all know. That said, if anyone has any ISA 2004 questions shout out, i've spent a little while digging through it and have a pretty tight ship going now.

Yeah true but the trouble is it's a known issue, as in MS know about it - just can't/won't fix it yet - so the advice is to keep the firewall patched but not service packed.

ISA Server 2004 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 do not go well together. So ironically you should run ISA on a standard Windows 2003 box. In terms of how to make the ISA use the county proxy, you need to go to Configuration | Networks. Select the web chaining tab and create a new web chaining rule. Give it a name; set the destination as External (under networks); Next choose to redirect requests to a specified upstream server (delegate credentials if you want - I do); fill in the server details and a logon if you need to; and then set to Retrieve requests directly from the specified destination when the primary route is unavailable. I've not had any success when "Automatically polling the upstream server" as ISA appears to flood the server with requests, which sometimes means ISA turns itself off from the web so I don't use that one. Another issue you may have regarding ISA not always connecting is that the External network connection must be connected before the ISA service (Microsoft Firewall) starts. If it becomes disconnected I have found the ISA service can disallow traffic to that card and a service restart is required.