WIndows Server 2003 Questions

[psychofurryewok]

I know Windows Server 2003 uses it's own proxy thing that was previously unsupported by most other applications until recently (for instance mozilla 1.5 won't work but 1.6 will). I've heard it mentioned once before in a thread but I can't seem to remember the name of it. I google'd and didn't turn up anything that explained it to me. Looking for any information someone can give or even just a name would do so I know what to narrow my search too. Thank you.

Also, one more question...at the office my boss runs a Windows 2003 Small Business Server, right out of the box, not much in the way of special tweakings. The ISA thing doesn't let us out on port 80 without authentication...in IE it automatically does it for you and you don't have to type anything, in Firefox/Mozilla you have to type it in each time (username and password) that you open the browser. Now, winamp doesn't seem to support either of these methods and I am unable to listen to internet radio stations. The boss says he'd be cool with opening it all up and letting everyone out without authentication but he's convinced it will make the server insecure. Is this so? How so? And is there any workaround so that I can get my radio stations, winamptv, and other streaming video/audio? I really would like to open it up so that anyone who's already authenticated through the ISA thing is aloud out no matter what, I don't see how that would make us insecure at all...if it would, please explain. It's not like we're running services people can connect to or anything and virus software is running on every machine and is automatically updated nightly by the server.

Thanks in advance!

 

[SJConsultant]

The user authentication is primarily used for reporting what websites people visit and the bandwidth that is utilized. Without the user authentication, he will lose the ability to track on a per user basis and also lose the ability to control what ports/services a group of people use *outbound*, so in a sense it would lessen the *outbound* security.

Winamp should be able to pass the necessary authentication credentials, although you'll need to experiment with it a bit.

 

[psychofurryewok]

Alright, that makes sense to me and to him. Thank you!