Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 SDK

Restarting Services after Configuration Changes

Configuration changes are applied only after the new settings are written to persistent storage and reloaded to the services that use them. Most changes can be applied dynamically without restarting any services. However, some configuration changes that you make require restarting the Microsoft Firewall service.

The following actions require restarting the Firewall service:

The Save method recursively writes all of the properties of an object and its subobjects to persistent storage. For a collection, the method also writes all of its elements and their properties to persistent storage.

The Save method has two parameters that control whether the Firewall service will be restarted and whether the new configuration settings will be reloaded to the services:

If the configuration settings being used by the ISA Server services are not updated when new values are written to persistent storage, the configuration settings used by each service will not be updated until the service is restarted or the new settings are reloaded by another call to the Save method.

We recommend making multiple configuration changes and then applying all the changes in a single call to the Save method on an object that contains all the other objects with configuration changes as subobjects. All the unsaved changes can be applied by restarting the required services by using either of the following techniques:

At any time, you can ascertain which services need to be restarted to apply unsaved changes by calling the GetServiceRestartMask method. This method retrieves a bitmask that specifies which services need to be restarted for any of the currently unsaved changes in the object on which it was called and all of its subobjects to take effect. Then you can apply the unsaved changes using the techniques described in the previous list.