Recently someone reported that a banner ad they wanted posted on a page was not showing up internally, although it did when viewed from their home. The banner ad was a hyperlinked picture - snagged from an external site. What was happening internally was that the image simply did not appear, although the rest of the page rendered fine and the call to the remote site's page (wrapped in a javascript script tag) was in the page source.

When I tried to open the specific page I received a error status 64 - The specified network name is no longer available.

Suspecting that the blockage was caused by ISA, and also suspecting that the blockage might actually be a good thing, I loaded fiddler on a outside client and tried to access the page. Sure enough, fiddler (once again) came through. The issue? In the words of fiddler 'This buggy server did not return headers.'

The issue is that whoever was returning the code stripped out all headers. While browsers will let that pass, ISA will block it.

The solution? Fix those darn headers!!!!

Recently when playing around with the Sharepoint 2010 beta I extended a site to use Forms and passed that through ISA 2006.

This is all very basic stuff, there are a number of good references on how to set this up, but what I did not expect was the http 500 internal error on my browser (see below).

The solution was to modify the HTTP filter (egad! an error message that actually gives the correct problem!) within ISA for that Rule (right-click the rule and select "Configure HTTP") and uncheck "Verify normalization" (see image below). I do not know if this is restricted to Sharepoint, but I suspect that will all the razzle-dazzle that SP2010 is trying to pull off it is tripping over the big feet of ISA...

When we migrated to x07, our Activesync started throwing the ol' 0x85010014 error. If you search for this online you will discover that it is one of the more common errors and there are about a dozen ways to fix it.

None of them worked. Everything was as it should be. I was completely flummoxed, until I stumbled across a post in a forum where someone said that he had solve the problem by changing the ISA "To" tab on the rule to cause the Request to come from the Original Client (see pic below). Tried that and voila, it worked!

Now I am not sure if there was not something else going on and I have not tried to change the rule back (my users get antsy if their phone stops synching), so take this with a grain of salt. Still, if you are pulling your hair out, try this:

Can't be done.

Any attempt to install will be met with "This operating system in not supported..." Supposedly the next version of ISA will be happy, happy, joy, joy, but not this one.

Could there be a hackaround? Probably. Should you do it? Probably not. Hacks can leave doors open unless you are positive you know where all the moving parts are.

So, buck up and used the old w03. At least for now...