Installation

Currently, installations are performed in almost all cases by CHILI Publish employees. The same applies to moving an installation to a different server (which is technically not part of the support/maintenance).

The process is mostly automated (and fully documented), but certain special cases in your initial server-configuration might stil cause issues during the installation process which need to be manually resolved. While this is an easy process for someone with experience in detecting the relevant symptoms, it can be hugely time-consuming for even experienced server administrators who aren't. And that is not the way we want our customers to experience their first exposure to our software (even if it does only occur once in five installations).

To schedule an installation (or migration), please contact your CHILI Publish representative. If all prerequisites for the server are met (and barring unforeseen security, server or network issues), an installation takes little time (mostly waiting for the installation files to download and initial testing after the installation itself). We can usually schedule this upon relatively short notice.

In order to succesfully complete an installation, we require some information and initial settings from our customer.

Initial Decisions

How do you want to distribute the CHILI Publisher components over servers? There are three important components:

• IIS / ASP.NET web application

• Windows Service

• File structure with data files

The three could be installed on the same server, or can be split up across three separate servers. The main factors influencing this decision are:

• Initial budget / infrastructure constraints (you might not want to immediately provide multiple servers or virtualized environments)

• Expected (initial) load on the system (if it is expected to be high immediately, you might want to separate the web application and the windows service immediately)

• Speed of access to the disk (CHILI Publisher is a IO-intensive application, and internal network traffic can turn out to be a performance bottleneck during high load)

The decision is not final, though. It is a relatively easy process to migrate any of the components (including the data files) at some point in the future. Because of this, most customers start with a single server for the three components, with the data files on the D drive (usually D:\CHILI\data).

As load on the server increases, the first steps tends to be to (together or in different phases):

• Assign more CPU / memory resources to the server (often an easy process, especially in virtualized environments). Do keep in mind that the CHILI Publisher license is limited to 16 CPUs or 16 CPU Cores (at the time of writing)

• Separate the web application and the windows service (which can be done without impact on licensing)

Will CHILI Publisher be required to access files on your network? If so, the application will almost certainly need to run under the identity of a domain user, which provides you with a way to grant privileges to the relevant users. And during installation we will need to be able to configure that account as the identity of the web application and the windows service.

Don't want to make decisions right now? No worries. We will install your server using the "default" configuration, and you can choose to modify them at some point in the future:

• All components on a single machine

• Data on the D drive if available, C drive if not

• A local "chili" user account (which we will create, or you can provide it with us)

Prerequisites

The server(s) need to meet the minimum requirements: Server Requirements

We need access to the server, with administrative privileges for our account (the Windows User serving as the identity of the CHILI application components itself, after intallation, obviously will not require administrative privileges).

Access to the server may be temporary, although we do recommend it to be open for at least a while after the installation, so we can easily follow up during the early phases of your implementation. And while again not required, continued access to the server can facilitate support in the future as well.

Access over Remote Desktop is preferred. A requirement for VPN is also no problem, but please inform your administrators that CHILI Publish employees work on Mac and/or Windows 7+ (64 bit). Both can be a challenge for certain VPN clients.

Team Viewer is acceptable. HOWEVER: team viewer by default uses port 80 for communication. This conflicts with the standard port used by CHILI / IIS for HTTP communication. If Team Viewer is used, please configure it to use another port.

Preferably, a public (or VPN-enabled) URL on which CHILI will be accessed should already have been added to your DNS.

If a Windows User has been provided by you to serve as the identity of the applications (see higher), it will need to have the "password never expires" option enabled, and any privilages granted to it (eg "Log on as a service") should not be cleared by automated background scripts.

Result of the installation

During the installation process, CHILI Publish will configure the following on your server(s):

• Create a local user account to serve as the identity for the application's components (if none was provided)

• Grant a limited set of local privileges to the account, such as:

  • Read access to the application files

  • Full access to the data files

  • "Log on as a service" privilege

• In IIS: create a "chili" Application Pool running under the mentioned user account's identity, and a "CHILI" virtual application under the default website (unless otherwise communicated by the customer)

• Install a Windows Service, and configure it to log on as the mentioned user account

• Install the latest Java Runtime environment

• Install some external image rendering engines

• Install Microsoft's ODBC driver for Excel files

After installation, CHILI Publish will provide you with an overview of the followed steps, and the various configured options.