first of all thanks to John Tolmachoff for the links. What i want to with isa? Ok, i do a study in informatiks and after 2,5 years i'm in the 6 semester. The last two years i spend on learning stupid and good things @ my university. Since a half year i'm administrating the wlan of our university based on a freeradius server (with a ldap interface to the novel based client-server architecture of our university), damn cool cisco accesspoints and an debian based gateway with nat, trafficaccounting and so on. (clients authenticate using ttls and inner pap, encrypted using wep with rapid rekeying). At home i used a debian too, but a half year ago i heard about a microsoft solution called isa server... So what i am expecting of ISA server is: - ability for building complex packet filtering rules for layer 3 - ability for building packet filtering rules for layer 2 - ability for building complex packet inspection and reaction - a nice gui - a good central management of diferent firewalls, to take a simple example the two firewalls of a dmz - connection failover ability - maybe proxy funktionality. i will read the the linked sites to find out. maybe somebody could tell me his experiences using ISA for this 7 points. again thanks for the quick answers Richard