Tutorials

How to install ISA 2004 Service Pack 2

Download ISA 2004 Service Pack 2 from Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 Standard Edition Service Pack 2 and be sure to read the documentation and the readme file. After the installation of this service pack you must reboot the server.

Installing the service pack

1. Start the installation of Service Pack 2
   
2. Accept the License Agreement
   
3. The installation wizard is working...
   
4. The installation of ISA 2004 Service Pack 2 has been completed.
   
5. You must reboot the server, click Yes
   
6. After you have rebooted the server and logged on you see this window. Read it and close the window.
   

Setting the registry for error-level tracing

"Service Pack 2 includes an error-level tracing mechanism that operates continually in the background. If necessary, the tracing information is available for Microsoft Product Support Services. The tracing mechanism does not collect personally identifiable information.  Tracing takes place in the background, and has a negligible affect on ISA Server performance. A 400 megabyte (MB) file (%windir%\debug\isalog.bin) is created by Service Pack 2 on each computer running ISA Server services, to contain the tracing information.  We recommend that you use the default settings for this feature. However, if you want to modify the tracing mechanism, you can do so through the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ISATrace. To change the size of the file used by tracing, change the value of CircularlLogSizeMB. To disable tracing, change the BootTracing value to 0. This does not delete the file, which has to be deleted manually. After registry changes, restart the computer so that the changes take effect. If you create the registry key before installing Service Pack 2, and set the BootTracing value to 0, the tracing file will not be added during the installation, and tracing will not be enabled."

The below described procedure is up to you to decide if you want this or not. If you have a lot of space on the drive where ISA is installed I would leave the default value as it is but if you do not have a lot of space this is a way to free up space.

1. Open the registry editor.
   
2. Set the CircularlLogSizeMB to "0" if you want to disable error level tracing.
   
3. Reboot the server.
4. After setting the CircularlLogSizeMB to "0" we can delete isalog.bin. It is located in the Windows\Folder
   

Configuring caching and compression

The first time you start the ISA Management console you will see some changes.

1. The Customer Experience Improvement Program. It is up to you to decide if you this or not.
   
2. Define HTTP Compression Preferences.
   
3. Now we have to decide how ISA should handle requests for compressed content. In this example we only want to allow compressed content to be send to clients on the Lan when they use Internet Explorer to browse the web. Click add...
4. ISA asks us to define the Network we want to set compression for, we choose the Internal network set.
   
5. ISA has now created a compression 'rule' but we still need to set the properties. Click Set Compression.
   
6. We need to set compression as follows.
   
7. Choose the tab 'Content Types' and choose to make only HTML Documents to be compressed.
   
8. We want to make sure that ISA inspects all compressed content for us. Choose the tab Content Inspection. By default this setting is turned on and that should remain that way.
   

ISA Server 2004 SP2 also includes the possibility to cache content from Windows Update and WSUS but because ISA is installed on the same server as WSUS I don't think it is usefull to do caching for those. IMHO it will only duplicate data on your server. If your WSUS server is configured to download updates from Windows Update it is already stored on your server. If you do not use WSUS it is a good idea to allow caching for Windows Update.

Before compression works in Internet Explorer you need to make a small change in the Advanced settings. You need to set 'Use HTTP 1.1 through proxy connections'.