The Document Portal Service is a stand-alone web server that allows document and file sharing.
In this section we will discuss various settings and configuration options for the Portal.
Note
The settings.ini file used to configure the Portal is itself documented with comments explaining most settings if you do not have this manual at hand.
Port Configutation
By default the server listens on port 81 unless changed in the settings.ini file in the ..\NovaCore\Portal folder or ..\NovaCore\Publisher folder for older installs.
If the machine that the NovaCore server components are installed on does not have an instance of IIS running then it is advisable to change the Port option under the [Web Server] section of the ini file to 80 (standard HTTP port). This makes accessing the Portal easier for users who then do not have to add the port number with the URL.
Secure connections with HTTPS
It is possible to configure the Portal web server to use HTTPS with TLS1.2 encryption by installing an SSL certificate, setting SSLEnabled to true and as with the HTTP port above you can define the listening port by setting the HTTPS_Port option. Setting this to 443 as the industry standard HTTPS port, if it is available on the server machine, is preferable but otherwise any available port number may be used.
For the server to respond to HTTPS requests you will need to install an SSL certificate for the domain or sub-domain you want the Portal to service. This therefor also means that you will need to setup a DNS record on your DNS server for your LAN to point to this server's IP address.
If the Portal is to service requests from the internet then you will need to setup a sub-domain on your domain's DNS host to point to you internet IP address of your router and setup port forwarding on your router to forward the traffic to your Portal server. How to do this is outside the scope of this manual but there is ample information on the web about how to do this.
Once you have a sub-domain and have purchased an SSL certificate for that sun-domain you need to save the certificate, root certificate and private key all in .pem format to the ..NovaCore\Portal\Certificate folder. You can name the 3 files as you like and declare those file names in the ini file or name the files by their default names as shown in the example below.
It is also important to note that the certificate's Private Key file must not have a password.
Tip |
If you have already generated the certificate with a password protected Private Key then you can extract a key file without password protection using the well known OpenSSL tool. To do this use then following in a command prompt from the folder that you've extracted the OpenSSL tool into: openssl rsa -in original.key -out new.key |
IMPORTANT: You must restart the NovaCore Portal service after making changes to the settings.ini file for the changes to take effect.
Example settings.ini file:
[WEB SERVER] Port=80 URL=portal.mydomain.com
SSLEnabled=true HTTPS_Port=443
SSLCertificateFile=cert.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile=key.pem SSLCertificateRootFile=root.pem |
