VPN

It is with great pleasure that I announce that I’ll be delivering a comprehensive, three-hour deep-dive training session at the TechMentor 2014 conference this year. The conference will be held August 11-15, 2014 in Redmond, WA. During the session you’ll learn how to design, plan, implement, and support DirectAccess running on Windows Server 2012 R2. If you’re considering deploying DirectAccess this year, you won’t want to miss out on this event. If you register before June 4 you can save $300.00, so register today!

When DirectAccess was first introduced as a feature of Windows Server 2008 R2, many considered the concept of always-on, secure remote access a natural evolution of traditional Virtual Private Networking (VPN) technologies. VPN had gone from being something that only IT administrators needed to provide remote support for their systems to an essential productivity tool for the modern, mobile workforce. Unfortunately, DirectAccess in Windows Server 2008 R2 was a bit ahead of its time. The idea was an excellent one, but in practice it was difficult to implement and carried steep infrastructure requirements, the most challenging of those being the requirement to deploy IPv6 on the internal network.

In our previous post at http://www.nappliance.com/blog/nappliance-nuag-and-directaccess-better-together we highlighted how UAG and DirectAccess are better together and the benefits of connecting through the DirectAccess. In this post we will concentrate on the advantages DirectAccess has over the traditional VPN connectivity and why companies would want to move away from the VPN infrastructure.

A client that is trying to access an SSL enabled application on a backend server (e.g. Exchange) that is published through the Forefront UAG portal gets an error, specifically:

“An unknown error occurred while processing the certificate. Contact the site administrator”.

The cause:

When you install an update for Microsoft Forefront UAG, it does not appear under the Windows control panel > Add/Remove programs. So, If you have to remove it for some reason then how do you remove an update? Well, UAG has an in-built script to remove the previously installed updates. The script is located at