The Microsoft ISA Server Firewall Client is a wonderfully amazing piece of software that allows you to very granularly control network communication on hosts which it is installed (you can download it here). If you are not familiar with the Firewall Client, it is a software component that can be installed on Windows hosts that allows you to proxy any TCP or UDP based communication. There is no need to configure individual applications to work with the Firewall Client. It is a layer service provider that transparently intercepts Winsock calls and if the destination is remote, the Firewall Client sends that communication to the ISA firewall. Your routing infrastructure becomes transparent to your clients, and you gain the ability to enforce user and group based access control. Best of all, the Firewall Client logs not only the user name for each request, but the application that made the request as well. Very powerful stuff!
Troubleshooting Firewall Client communication can sometimes be difficult, however. Thankfully enough, there is a command line utility included with the Firewall Client that makes that job much easier. If you navigate to the ‘Program FilesMicrosoft Firewall Client 2004′ folder you will find a program called ‘fwctool.exe’. This tool allows you to do things like enable and disable the client software itself:
fwctool.exe enable
fwctool.exe disable

It can also be used to display the version of the Firewall Client software you currently have installed:
fwctool info
You can alter the configuration of the Firewall Client:
fwctool SetManualServer
fwctool SetAutoDetectServer

And you can display the current configuration information as well:
fwctool PrintConfig
fwctool PrintServerConfig
fwctool PrintUserConfig
fwctool PrintGlobalConfig

The Firewall Client has the ability to automatically configure the web browser that is installed on the workstation. This option can be displayed, enabled, or disabled from the command line as well:
fwctool DisplayBrowserConfig
fwctool EnableBrowserConfig
fwctool DisableBrowserConfig

You can also verify connectivity to the ISA firewall by using the PingServer option:
fwctool PingServer
I absolutely love the Firewall Client because of its power and flexibility. Having the ability to leverage strong user and group based authentication on ALL TCP and UDP protocols is fantastic. Look for more posts here on my blog about the Firewall Client and how to troubleshoot it as well as to leverage it




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