slow authentication to OWA 2003 through ISA

[porterno]

I am attempting to extend OWA to employees in the field but I'm running into what seems to be an ISA - SSL problem. Internally, my SSL OWA server runs fine - no problems with certificates, authentication or speed.

However when I run the 'Publish Web Access Server' wizard in ISA and open OWA to the Internet, authentication through the firewall to the OWA server becomes terribly slow. Eventually, the certificate prompt appears (its an internal CA) and then about a full minute later the login dialog appears and I am able to connect to the internal OWA server. Once connected, there is no problems with speed at all - OWA runs perfectly well.

This is a tricky problem because it does work but just very slowly. Anyone found themselves in a similar situation? Any ideas or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Knutern]

Let me see if I got this right: When employees in the field connects to your OWA server, they wait almost a minute, until a security alert is displayed which requests the user to either proceed or not, because you use an internal certificate. The dialog has an exclamation mark next to "The security certificate was issued by a company you have not choosen to trust...." and the others are ok?

If so, it's because they do not have the root-certificate installed on their machines.

The moment they have the root certificate, it will take a fraction of the time to log in.

HTH.

Cheers
Knutern