Windows Admin Center is an excellent Management Tool and an ideal way to manage your Azure Stack HCI clusters. I first started using it in anger in 2019, but quickly encountered and issue in that there was no obvious way to allow it to talk out via a proxy server?
Now if you’re anything like me then you’ll have all your management servers squirrelled away behind firewalls and addressed into internal networks with all internet access controlled via proxy servers.
For WAC this scenraio can cause a couple of issues:
- The ‘ServerManagementGateway’ service will not start listening on port 443 and WAC simply won’t work (if installing as a Gateway Server)
- WAC will not be able to connect to ‘https://aka.ms/sme-extension-feed’ and you won’t be able to to install or update Extensions
Solution
Use the bitsadmin tool to set the proxy for the Service Account that the ‘ServerManagementGateway’ service runs under:
C:\>bitsadmin /Util /SetIEProxy networkservice MANUAL_PROXY 10.x.x.x:1234 “<local>”
In the above example the Service is running as the Network Service account, which is the default
Personally I thought this would be an obvious configuration to the WAC settings and I have submitted a User Voice request that you are free to vote for:
https://windowsserver.uservoice.com/forums/295071-management-tools/suggestions/39418285-add-the-ability-to-configure-a-proxy-for-wac-to-in
Update
WAC now supports proxy servers natively … thanks for listening MS 🙂