Test Lab Guide–Demonstrate UAG SP1 RC DirectAccess with SSTP and Remote Desktop Gateway (RDG) Released

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imageOK folks, this is the last TLG for a week or two. Yes, I still have a couple of important ones that need to be done (TLGs that demonstrate how UAG DirectAccess works with BranchCache [very cool!] and  a Pilot Deployment Test Lab Guide where the UAG DirectAccess server belongs to a different forest than the computers and users).

So what is this Test Lab Guide? Nothing other than the Test Lab Guide: Demonstrate UAG SP1 RC DirectAccess with Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) and Remote Desktop Gateway (RDG) . For a while I wondered if it was worth the effort to do this one, because I don’t know of many people who are using the RDG feature included with the UAG server. But then I thought about it and realized that maybe no one is using the RDG feature because no one is writing about it Smile  For this reason (and also because I wanted to see if it actually worked), I decided to move forward on this Test Lab Guide.

The good news is that it works! Indeed, the combined DirectAccess, SSTP and Remote Desktop Gateway deployment works a treat. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, not only for writing a Test Lab Guide, but for deploying myself in my home office (actually, my wife Deb Shinder did the live deployment after she tested the Test Lab Guide for me).

The RDG setup also supports down-level clients such as XP and Vista, which helps in those occasional situations when I don’t have a worked laptop and have to borrow one (like when I’m on the road and my laptop dies and I get a “loaner” that is running XP SP2). Accessing the Remote Desktop works great, and also the RemoteApp feature is even more useful – since I can use that together with my DirectAccess client configuration when I need access to an app that’s not installed on my laptop.

I hope you like this Test Lab Guide and find it useful. As always, if you have any questions or problems with this Test Lab Guide, let me know! Send me a note to the email address in my sig line and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

HTH,

Tom

Tom Shinder
tomsh@microsoft.com
Knowledge Engineer, Microsoft DAIP iX/Forefront iX
UAG Direct Access/Anywhere Access Group (AAG)
The “Edge Man” blog (DA all the time): https://blogs.technet.com/tomshinder/default.aspx
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