Winbox Pre-installation Guide

This document gives you information on how to prepare Windows servers for installation of H-Sphere components and notes you should consider before proceeding to the installation.

Notes:

• We don't install H-Sphere on live servers.
• On Windows, the users group by default has the read/write permissions on all disks. Upon H-Sphere installation, the users group is stripped of the read/write permissions on the system directory and other directories that may affect hosting. No other permissions are modified. If needed, change them by yourself.

 

Hardware and Partitioning Requirements

For better functioning we recommend to have not less than 256RAM. And as for partitions it's better to break it into two:

• C:\ for system files and program files - at least 5 GB.
• D:\ for users' content - the rest of the HDD.
  
  Important: partition containing users' content must be NTFS formated to support disk space quota.

 

Software Requirements

Before installing H-Sphere to Windows platform, make sure your system complies with the following software requirements:

1. Windows Server, Windows Advanced Server, Windows Web Edition
   a) must not be PDC (Primary Domain Controller)
   b) must not be in Active Directory mode
2. Terminal Service or pcAnywhere for remote access to the computer
3. Both, the system disk and the one with user homes, must have NTFS file system
4. External IP
5. IIS (Internet Information Server) service set up for WWW service and FTP service
6. FrontPage extensions version 4 or higher;
7. ASP.NET 1.1
8. The following ports must be open:
   - 20, 21 (FTP)
   - 80 (HTTP)
   - 443 (HTTPS)
   - 873 (Rsync)
   - 10125 (SOAP) *
   * H-Sphere version 2.4 Beta 6 includes support for H-Sphere Windows Services. When creating a new account on winbox, Windows service method is run with SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). It's a new protocol of data communication between CP and Windows server.
   To enable support for Win services in H-Sphere, go to hsphere.properties file and set: SOAP_SUPPORT = true
   Also, make port 10125 available on Winbox. This port is used to connect to Windows services by default. It can be set in the hsphere.properties file: SOAP_PORT = 10125
9. These are the default ports for * SQL servers to be open if your customers connect to them via ODBC:
   • MySQL - 3306
   • PostgreSQL - 5432
   • MS SQL-1433
   Note: If *SQL server is put on any port other than the default, don't forget to open it.
   To access Windows boxes via pcAnywhere or Terminal Service, the ports 5631 and 3389 correspondingly must be open.

Third party commercial products are purchased separately and must be installed prior to H-Sphere:

• MS SQL server
• Real Server
• ColdFusion
• Miva

The following noncommercial third party products should also be set up prior to the H-Sphere installation:

• ASP.NET (see also ASP.NET Support)
• ActivePerl
• PHP 4.3.1 and higher (except for PHP 5.x).
  Note: To make sure you have all required libraries necessary for proper work of PHP, install PHP from the zip archive, not self-extracting executable. The mentioned libs are also needed for correct work of Webshell.
• MDAC 2.8 and higher.

NTFS Permissions For ActivePerl and PHP

Upon the completion of ActivePerl and PHP installation, please set the following permissions on the PERL and PHP directories and their content. They are required so respective libraries can be run when Perl or PHP scripts are requested via http.

These permissions are set during H-Sphere installation and aren't checked by H-Sphere updates, so please don't modify them afterwards.

Group	Permissions
Administrators System	Full
Users	Read Execute

Peculiarities of H-Sphere work under Windows

Please consider the following when you intend to install H-Sphere on Windows servers:

1. H-Sphere 2.3.2 works with IIS 5 compatible mode. H-Sphere 2.4 works with IIS 6 compatible mode.
2. H-Sphere 2.3.2 doesn't support shared SSL on Windows server. In H-Sphere 2.4, shared SSL scheme was redesigned to also work with IIS 6.0. More on Winbox Shared SSL.
3. CDONTS object library doesn't work on Windows. We recommend using CDO instead of CDONTS on all Windows servers, since it is a newer and more flexible.