About Forefront TMG Clients

Forefront TMG supports three types of clients:

Firewall clients are client computers that have Firewall Client installed and enabled.
Secure network address translation (SecureNAT) clients are client computers that do not have Firewall Client installed and enabled and whose default gateway is set to a directly or indirectly (through a router or chain of routers) reachable IP address of a Forefront TMG computer.
Web proxy clients are client applications or computers that send requests to the TCP port on which Forefront TMG listens for outgoing Web requests from the network in which the client computer resides. By default, Forefront TMG listens for outgoing Web requests from clients in the Internal network on port 8080. Web Proxy clients are typically CERN-compliant applications (Web browser applications) that are configured to send Web requests to a Forefront TMG computer.

The following table compares the Forefront TMG clients.

Feature	SecureNAT client	Firewall client	Web proxy client
Installation required	Some network configuration changes are required	Yes	No, but requires configuration of the Web browser
Operating system support	Any operating system that supports Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)	Only Windows platforms	All platforms, but by way of the Web application
Protocol support	Requires application filters for multiple-connection protocols	All Winsock applications	Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Secure HTTP (HTTPS), and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) (download requests)
User-level authentication	Only the IP address of the user is sent to the Forefront TMG computer.	The Firewall Client software sends the user's credentials to the Forefront TMG computer with each request.	User credenticals can be supplied in response to requests from Forefront TMG.
Server applications	No configuration or installation required	Requires configuration file	N/A

Web proxy clients can run on Firewall client computers and on SecureNAT client computers. If the Web application on the computer is configured explicitly to use a Forefront TMG computer, then all Web requests (HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP) are sent to the Forefront TMG Web proxy.

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Build date: 11/30/2009