Publishing ADFS using Web Application Proxy behind TMG

During a recent upgrade of ADFS from 2.0 to 3.0, we saw an interesting issue publishing the ADFS 3.0 proxy through TMG 2010.

The ADFS 2.0 proxy was published via TMG using a non-preauthenticating publishing web rule which had worked happily since ADFS was first used. When ADFS 3.0 was installed ad configured, the firewall rule was modified to change the IP address that should be used to direct traffic to the ADFS 3.0 proxy instead of the old ADFS 2.0 proxy. When tested, this generated an error in the browser of the user attempting to access the ADFS proxy to sign into their organisation account:

Error Code 64: Host not available

“The page cannot be displayed. Error Code 64: Host not available”

In addition, the test of the firewall rule fails with the error “Connectivity error. Error details: 64 – The specified network name is no longer available.”

This obviously meant that users could not sign in to access services authenticated using ADFS.

The solution is to use a non-web server publishing rule on TMG to simply forward all traffic to the ADFS proxy/Web Application Proxy, however this requires that a dedicated external IP address is available on TMG, or all applications need to be published using the Web Application Proxy instead of using TMG.