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Accepted
Oskar Duveborn
Asked: 2012-08-23 12:11:49 +0800 CST

Does Microsoft TMG 2010 handle websockets, at least through SSL?

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I thought in my own insanity that if I published an IIS 8 web server with websockets through HTTPS there shouldn't be a problem even with the TMG.

However, regardless of publishing, filtering and request settings, I don't see any websocket connection upgrade requests reaching the web server when going through the TMG.

Using SignalR I get fallback to whatever lesser transport the browser in question supports. It works great whenever I bypass the TMG of course.

Do I need to find another firewall / filter to get this to work or is there a way?

I'm having trouble even finding information on what products support web sockets, all I see is that weird quote aboute less than 1% of current proxy servers are incompatible, and using HTTPS should alleviate any problems. And whenever I throw "websocket" into a Google search with a Microsoft product - the result is simply gibberish and/or malware sites.

tl;dr: I realize Windows Server 2012 is still not RTM, but is there a way to establish IIS 8 websocket connections through a TMG 2010 SP2?

microsoft-forefront-2010

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    So this is how I finally got this working:

    • Don't use Web Site publishing rules, use a Non-Web Server rule instead
    • Use the default HTTPS Server protocol definition
      • Do not enable any filters in the protocol
    • In the To section of the rule, have requests appear to come from the original client
    • Also, unrelated but alas, make sure the Web Server is a SecureNAT client (ie it's default gateway is the TMG in question)

    This has some limitations but works for my need: publish IIS 8 ASP.NET 4.5 sites that utilizes web sockets.

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