Auditing multiple networks in large WAN environments
In more complex environments, you may have multiple networks that you want to audit and you may want to allow users on these or other networks to access your Enterprise Server.
This situation is very similar to the one presented above in section 8.3.2. The only difference is that you will need to make your Enterprise Server available to the users and network auditing agents on any external networks that will need to view or store information in your ENT Inventory.
Since the network auditing agents, just like any web browser, conduct all communication with your ENT Server entirely over the HTTP protocol, making your ENT Server visible outside the local network where it is installed will normally be a simple matter of configuring port forwarding for one of the ports on the firewall/router that connects your main network to the WAN/Internet. Port forwarding allows you to forward all requests that are made to that particular port on the firewall/router to your Enterprise Server. So you could, for example, forward all requests made on port 80 to the machine where you have ENT Server installed, as a web site running under IIS.
Once your Enterprise Server can be accessed from all of the networks that you manage, accessing this via a web browser on these networks or configuring instances of ENT NetCenter and ENT Network Monitor to connect to this server is no more complicated that connecting to an ENT Server on your local network. This is analogous to connecting to a web site on the internet rather than a local intranet server.
Finally, if you have any stray machines on or off this network, which you want to audit, you could do so using EntAudit.exe. As discussed earlier, EntAudit.exe can be configured to send the results of PC Audits that it conducts to a particular email address. Your technicians can then retrieve these snapshot files and post them manually using ENT NetCenter.
