File Fabric FAQ

Yes, the appliance is provided in OVF format and VMWare VMDK format and is configured with VMWare drivers.
All major hypervisor platforms support converting from OVF and install the relevant drivers. This will help you going

• Appliance OS : CentOS 5.8 64bit
• Vmware drivers are installed from the vmware repository and the installed package is yum install vmware-tools-nox

Also see: deploying on xen and MS Hyper-V.

Please contact support, they can provide you with the root password and you can setup the network configuration using linux tools.

You can find information on configuring centos static IP address at the following link.

We strongly recommend using SSL certificates, even during a trial, as the appliance communicates with the devices using HTTPS.

You still can use the appliance without SSL certficates, but the browser will show a warning message and clients on mobile devices will not be able to connect using HTTPS.

You can also use self signed SSL certificates and you will need to install the CA certificate on the mobile devices and client machines for https to work properly.

You can configure the appliance to always use HTTPS by logging in as appladmin and enabling Always use HTTPS in Site Functionality.

In majority of cases appliance works as a gateway to your own storage, but as the appliance is standard CentOS , you can attach a new disk and use it as storage.

See the following link for instructions Using a New Disk as Local Storage.

Please see Monitoring in admin section.

Also please note that the Appliance is self-monitoring with regards to any errors generated.

An email is generated and sent to the SMTP configured email upon an error occurring. The email details the reason the error occurred. It should be forwarded to the SME support team who will check the severity of the error and whether it has been resolved in the master code since the Appliance was issued.

Depending upon severity a patch will be issued or else it will be resolved in an Appliance update.

Please see Appliance Upgrade.

Login as pre configured Acme account and add your provider. See adding a provider.

Most probably it is the network configuration. A few suggestions.

• Check the driver installed are correct for your version of VMWare;
• Check your firewall is not blocking or throttling any connections when a client connects to the appliance.

We highly recommend having a firewall in front of the appliance as a best practice.

Of course please see Active Directory Integration.

You can setup the appliance in Highly Available configuration. Please see High Availability & Failover options.

Please see the security white paper available from our white papers page.

FTP is not firewall friendly protocol. Login to the appliance as root and stop the firewall “service iptables stop” and try adding the FTP provider again.

You can snapshot the appliance or if you just want to backup the meta data you can do it as appliance admin meta data backup.

NOTE: Please also be sure to check the Cloud Appliance section of the FAQ Page which also has solutions to common issues when working with the SME Cloud Appliance.

To disable to contacts you need to add the option:

disablecreatecontacts = 1

to the config file.

Although the File Fabric does not cache any data, if 'resume upload' is enabled for a package files ban be stored on the server whilst uploading (to enable resume to occur) which can fill up the disk space. You can disable this from the package assigned to the users as the appladmin user.

You can also increase the disk space for the appliance by following this article.

Temporary files are stored at /var/www/smestorage/public_html/cgi-bin/uploader/tmp in the event you need to clear the files manually prior to applying the suggested changes.

Each request to S3 and similar storage services carries a timestamp containing the time at which the request was made. S3 and S3 compatible services will refuse to honour a request to read or write a file if the request appears to be too old (older than 15 minutes in the case of S3) or if it is significantly ahead of the current time as known to the storage server.

When this happens SME will display an error message. In some cases the error message won’t indicate that a time difference is the cause of the error but, if you see a message inclusive of this text:

The difference between the request time and the current time is too large

you can be sure the cause is that the clock on your SME appliance is out of sync with the clock on your storage service.

To fix this problem you need only enable the ntpd service, which keeps the clock on your appliance in sync with a clock on a server that is a reliable time keeper:

\# su - root\ \# systemctl enable ntpd.service\ \# systemctl start ntpd.service

S3 and S3 compatible services deal exclusively in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for the purpose of comparing request times to the current time. This means that the timezone to which your server is set doesn’t matter. As long as the UTC on your appliance is close to correct, your request should be honoured by the storage service.