You Can’t Specify the Outbound IP Address in ISA Server 2006

I just spent several hours attempting to set my outbound SMTP traffic from Exchange 2007 to use a specific IP on my ISA Server 2006 external NIC of the 5 available.  I wanted to isolate mail traffic to a specific IP address.  However, it turns out that you cannot send traffic over a specific IP in ISA 2006 for any protocol, unless you install another NIC with the IP address that you want to send on.  Here is a blurb that was posted by someone on Experts-Exchange after they spoke with Microsoft support on this issue (Not linking since you won’t be able to see the link):

'No version of ISA can, to date, select the IP address that will be used for outbound NAT addressing - only inbound as I have mentioned before. This facility WILL be introduced in ISA 2008 either in the beta release or in the full version. Yes, you can use an additional NIC with a public IP and route mail through that connector but long term, this is not a scaleable option'.

Proper Way to Redirect OWA Users via ISA Server 2006

Oops, an update to my last post about redirecting OWA users when deploying Exchange with ISA.  Here is a blog detailing the "correct" way to do it, and also how to redirect http to https, etc.

Redirecting OWA URL with ISA Server 2006 (Quick and Dirty way)

In setting up Exchange 2007 OWA through ISA Server 2006, I realized that it would be a lot easier to tell users to access it via http://owa.domain.com as opposed to http://owa.domain.com/owa (which is repetitive if nothing else).

Problem is, there is no obvious way to do this in ISA or Exchange.  Fortunately I am not the first one to have this problem, and it has already been solved.  The short version of the fix is to set OWA up 100% according to whatever book, article, white paper you are already following.  THEN, add another web access rule point to the same site, except this time set it to Deny.  You don't have to get too fancy on the various settings, authentication, etc. and just use the same listener that you created for OWA.

Once the rule is created, make sure it is the one just above the main OWA access rule (I named the new one "Redirect OWA" so I would know what it was), and then go back in and on the deny page, set it to Redirect to your specific OWA subdirectory (http://owa.domain.com/owa).  It works great!

Here are the two resources that I found to be most helpful:

Thomas Shinder's Blog

Blog du Tristank (look in the comments)

**UPDATE** I have since found a blog that tells the correct way to do this (but the quick and dirty listed above still works fine).  Here is a link to my blog post about the correct way.

Installing Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 (aka UAC is a pain)

Over the last couple of days I have been setting up Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 RTM.  No matter what I tried, I was stuck in a Catch-22: If I logged in as Local Admin on the box, I didn't have permission to make the necessary changes to the domain; if I logged in as Domain Admin, I didn't have permission to write to the local log file on the C:\ drive of the Exchange server.  I kept getting errors like the one at right from the GUI, or this one from the command line:

Failed to initialize the log file: Access to the path 'C:ExchangeSetupLogs\ExchangeSetup.log' is denied.

Setup will not continue.

Those are NOT the most descriptive errors.  If I logged in as local admin, those errors went away, but instead I received errors that the local admin account didn't have the rights to make massive changes to the domain (shocker).

I posted on the Microsoft Technet Exchange forums, and hardly anyone read my post, much less answered it.  One person responded that they had the same problem, so I knew it wasn't just me.  I noticed that I couldn't run the basic commands that install Windows 2008 components, like PowerShell without getting similar errors.  It didn't matter if it was on a Hyper-V VM, or a physical server, I could not resolve the problem.

Then I had an idea.  I knew that Windows 2008 and Vista are the same underneath, and I remember that the first thing I did when I installed Vista was to disable UAC. . . hmm. . . yep, that was the problem.  Here is where you do it on Windows 2008, just like in Vista:

Then go here:

I hope that anyone else that is about to go crazy from Installing Exchange 2007 on Exchange 2008 finds this blog entry and simply disables UAC.