Part 7: Infrastructure essentials Blogcast - Our first certificate authority

Continuing the blogcast series on infrastructure essentials.

We're now moving towards making Outlook Web Access (OWA), Outlook via RPC/HTTP and ultimately VPN connectivity available from the Internet. To make access from the Internet secure, we need a means to be able to encrypt the traffic from the Internet into our network. For OWA, we use SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer to create an encrypted channel between the end users browser and our ISA server. SSL encryption requires us to use PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) certificates. Although we could purchase certificates from third parties at varying levels of expense, we can do it for free, as Windows Server 2003 has a built in Certificate Authority (CA) out of the box. Hence, in this part, we set up our first CA for our contoso.com domain. Early next week, we'll be configuring OWA for Internet Access. Click here to view.

Series Index:

0. Network configuration and series background.
1. Getting started
2. ISA Server configuration to allow basic web browsing capability
3. ISA Firewall Client basic configuration
4. ISA Firewall Client auto-detection through WPAD configuration
5. Configuring an Exchange mailbox and Outlook profile
6. Fixing 0x8004010F on Outlook send/receive