i am looking to create a LAN network i want to make an ISA and cache server for better performance and security
i am looking easy to understand and complete tutorials, help required and also suggestions are accepted for making my network very fast and efficient
one more thing i have to rely more on cache as the internet bandwidth will not be more than 2Mbs
help required.
ISA Cache is really meant for networks with hundreds of users, not a small network with a 2Mb connection.
The reason for this is that if you imagine a large network, people may all be accessing the BBC, or another news website at the same time. Caching is great for 20+ users accessing at the same time, but if you only have one or two, by the time you visit the site again, the content will most likely be out of date and need to be updated.
...As well as many websites with dynamic individual content (look at this site for example!). It just makes cache servers pretty much outdated... and if anything, may actually be slower.
This is just a friendly warning before you spend thousands on hardware and licensing needed for ISA.
That being said, if I have not convinced you, ISA is pretty easy to install.
The two easiest ways are as follows:
First - a machine with two network cards, have one facing the internet and one facing your internal network, you then use the ISA machine as a router, you can either set up the ISA machine as a proxy server on the clients or just install the ISA client to auto configure the machine.
Second - easier, use a machine with one network card, just on the network and again, use the client or set a proxy server. As far as I remember, there is no template for this scenario and whilst you can still use ISA for security (web filtering, logging etc.), you will not be using it as a firewall.
Depending on what you want to do with it and at which scale you will have to deply it there is plenty of tutorials here.
As always with infracstructure deployments using a technology you don't master, start by familiarizing yourself with the product, use virtual machines extensively to tests different scenarii and measure the bandwith you'll need/save based on actual captures on the network to replay those packets through ISA. Think compression (gzip or even lossy for images but be careful that canhave a HUGE impact CPU/latency-wise)
