I ask this question from experience. I actually have a web site which is behind an ISA server. I signed up for a Microsoft bcentral web promotion package, but my web site never showed up in any search engines, and the limited technical knowledge of the bcentral staff was unable to determine why. My guess is that these "web crawlers" and other search engines first try a simple ping, and if they do not receive a response, they move on.

Does this sound reasonable? Anybody out there who has successfully been "found" by a search engine?

Thanks in advance.

I have been found by Northern Light, and probably others, but I don't know for sure. Except that I get e-mails from visitors from time to time, so I must be listed somewhere.

If you want to enable ISA to reply to pings you need to create a a packet filter. I'm not in front of ISA right now, but it's something like this:

Go to Access Rules tab. Right Click on Packet Filters and select New. Type a name (e.g. Incoming Ping). On the next screen choose "Custom". On the next screen there's a drop down list for TCP/UDP/ICMP. Select ICMP. In the fields below that, choose:

Incoming
Type 8
Code 0

Click on next and that should be the finished screen. Make sure the new filter is enabled and wait a few minutes. You should be able to ping your external address from the outside.

This is from memory so let me know if you get it working, if not, when I get in front of ISA again, I publish more detailed instructions :-)

-Mark
P.S. Having ping off is not a bad thing, it hides your site somewhat so that a "casual" scan will skip your address.