[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] ISA 2004 tracking file (like your C: drive wasn't full enough already?) - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"
Sunday, February 05, 2006 10:19 AM bradley

ISA 2004 tracking file (like your C: drive wasn't full enough already?) 

In the newsgroups today... Gary reports the following:
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Well, here's a reason not to install ISA2K4/SP2: It will create a new 400mb 
file, Windir\Debug\ISALOG.BIN, and a second, new 400mb file, ISALOG.BAK, on 
the C: drive. According to my admittedly superficial reading of the technote 
(google ISALOG.BIN), this file's purpose is for troubleshooting by MSSupport 
in the event of problems with ISA 2004.
 
You can get rid of this by going to HKLM/Software/Microsoft/ISATracing and 
setting the BootTracing parameter to 0. Then reboot and delete both 
ISALOG.BIN and ISALOG.BAK.
 
The technote further says that you can prevent the creation of these files 
by adding the reg key and value before installing SP2.
 
Below is the relevant info from the technote:
 
Nearly one gig of space taken up on crowded C: drives JUST IN CASE 
MSSupport wants to look at the log file. Someone at MSSupport has lost his 
mind.
 
GaryK
 
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/isa/2004/plan/sp2.mspx
(search page for isalog.bin)
Tracing
Service Pack 2 includes an error-level tracing mechanism that operates 
continually in the background. If necessary, the tracing information is 
available for Microsoft Product Support Services. The tracing mechanism does 
not collect personally identifiable information.
 
Tracing takes place in the background, and has a negligible affect on ISA 
Server performance. A 400 megabyte (MB) file (%windir%\debug\isalog.bin) is 
created by Service Pack 2 on each computer running ISA Server services, to 
contain the tracing information.
 
We recommend that you use the default settings for this feature. 
However, if you want to modify the tracing mechanism, you can do 
so through the registry key 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ISATrace. 
To change the size of the file used by tracing, change the value of 
CircularlLogSizeMB. To disable tracing, change the BootTracing value to 0. 
This does not delete the file, which has to be deleted manually. 
After registry changes, restart the computer so that the changes 
take effect. If you create the registry key before installing 
Service Pack 2, and set the BootTracing value to 0, the 
tracing file will not be added during the installation, and tracing 
will not be enabled.
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And of course ...what does that do to an already full C:... 
yeah you guess it.  Fill it up even more...
There appears to be a way to move it to another drive letter before you install.. 
checking and will post and update to the blog
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# re: ISA 2004 tracking file (like your C: drive wasn't full enough already?)

Monday, February 06, 2006 11:37 AM by BML

I am running Win2k AD, and a few Win2003 Member Servers and have noticed the random scotty dog icon file, in c:\winnt\temp\ , having a random alpha-numric name on win2k pro, file size is 169KB.

This site is the only one that had any info the google.com showed..... I'll check back to see if there is anything added. Thanks

# re: ISA 2004 tracking file (like your C: drive wasn't full enough already?)

Thursday, February 09, 2006 5:38 AM by sbsfaq

you have Trend Micro AV installed on your server - this is part of normal operation and can be ignored.