Life of an Admin

Recently i was faced with a situation where i had to move our current installation of ISA 2004 to a new machine. I could have just imaged the hard drive over to the new machine, checked the network / ip settings, etc and would have been easy.. But, the problem was i need to have a new OS. We wanted to downgrade from Windows 2003 enterprise to 2003 Standard, so imaging was not an option.

So these are the steps i followed..

Created a new machine with Windows 2003 Standard.
Did not add it to the domain yet and did all the following while it was offline/not connected to network.
Installed ISA 2004
backed up ISA 2004 configurations from the old server. I backed up firewall settings, system policy and network settings from the ISA interface.
After backing up, i removed the old ISA from the Domain, and disconnected it from the network.

Connected the new ISA to network and changed its name to same as old ISA. Added it to the domain.
Imported the 3 settings which were backed up.
Configured the network settings and ip addresses as old ISA

some fine tuning might be required, like if you changed anything in the firewall client configurations on the old ISA, you might have to do it manually.

i compared the settings / configurations with the old ISA, and everthing seemed fine.


If your ISA is DHCP or DNS or both, then you have to take into consideration these settings also.
My ISA was a DNS hosting stub zone for my active directory integrated DNS and was also the DHCP server.
I had to install DNS and DHCP on ISA and configure it exactly the same way after connecting it to the network.

Everything went smooth..