NTLM authentication in WinGate 6.0.4

[epagliosa]

Hi everybody,
We recently upgraded our Wingate 4.5.2 to 6.0.4 Professional (unlimited users) and we set it up to synchronize users and groups with our Windows 2000 Server Active Directory: no problem, everything was clearly explained in the online help and in your website.
So we got all the users and groups imported into the WinGate user database, but after we set up the WWW Proxy server policies to allow only a given group to access the Internet, the WinGate engine started crashing repeatedly without notice after working fine for some minutes.
The policy change was done this way: first, in the General page, NTLM was checked under "Authentication where required by policies".
Second, in the Policies page, we added the relevant Group (named WGUsers) selecting the "User must be authenticated" radio button.
Third, we chose from the pull down next to Default rights "are ignored".
Shortly after that, then engine crashed and never could stay up more than 15 minutes, depending on the number of users connecting to the Proxy service (more users -> faster crash).
The only way of getting rid of this problem was stopping using the O.S. user database and restoring the policies to Everyone - Unrestricted rights and Default rights may be used instead (there was no modification of the default System policies).
Please note that while the engine was running, everything worked as expected, that is, users belonging to the WGUsers group were allowed to access Internet, while others got "Access denied" pages on their browsers.
We were even able to see that if a user was not logged to our Windows Domain, for instance logged on locally to his/her PC, he/she got the Internet Explorer request for authentication, and giving the correct user/password/domain credentials (of a user belonging to WGUsers group), the access was granted.
The machine on which the WinGate Server is installed is an IBM Netvista 6269-R1G Pentium III 866Mhz, with 384MB Ram and 10GB HD.
The O.S. is Windows 2000 Server SP4 with all the critical patches from the MS Windows Update site.
After this problem first showed up, we re-installed everything from scratch, both the O.S. and WinGate, but everything ended up exactly the same way.
Hope someone can help us - thanks in advance.

[MattP]

Hmm, this is a bit of a strange problem. What if you add a policy that Everyone must be authenticated?

Are you TRing connections to the WWW proxy or is this for direct proxy connections?

How many users are actually connecting? Is it 10 users causing a crash in 5 minutes, or 100 users?

When you say that WinGate crashes what exactly happens? Does the engine stop or does it hang?

What is the last entry in the history log when the engine crashes? Is this consistently the same?

Do you have any other WinGate policies?

Just to clarify, are you using the local machine database or a remote database?

Thanks,

Matt