First post of the new year! also can't be arsed to install WL Writer so doing this in the web form. blech. :) One of my "projects" for 2012 is to suss out DirectAccess, a transparent "VPN-less" secure connection back to the mother ship from a roaming corporate laptop. On paper it sounds pretty good, but from a demonstration point of view, it ranks up there with watching grass grow or paint dry. When set up and configured, a laptop (or desktop I suppose) out of the office and off the corporate network can access network resources behind the firewall. Going the other way, IT can centrally control corporate laptops out in the field via Group Policy, WSUS and other technologies. To give a demo, you'd take your laptop off-campus, fire it up, log in... and... use it... not much of a demo :) the stuff going on behind the scenes is interesting, but not for the average person. My engine, however, gets running. I ordered up an HP Microserver last month to try this out on. I suppose I could have installed 2008 R2 on any old computer kicking around, provided it had two network ports on it, but I also wanted to do a hands-on with this little server. The HP Microserver is ridiculously cheap for what it is: an HP ProLiant server. it's about half the size of a breadbox and has four non-hot-swap SATA drive bays, two memory slots, a PCIe x16 and and a PCIe x1 half-height slot, a 5.25" drive bay for an optical or tape drive and one large low-rpm fan on the back so it's really quiet. All that for about $400. I bumped up the price somewhat by doubling the RAM and adding a server NIC card to get a few more network ports on it, but it was still under $1000. Putting a copy of Windows Server on it is where most of the expense comes from. Since this is a test, I put a TechNet/MSDN copy on it and fired it up. There are a lot of pre-requisites for setting up DirectAccess including a good CA/PKI setup, and probably the most difficult part: 2 consecutive public IP addresses that don't end in 09-10. I've got all that covered now, so my next step will be to make some changes to Active Directory, my edge firewalls and then I can try it out!