The purpose of this document is to provide comprehensive information on how to prepare Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers for the installation of H-Sphere components. It covers the following topics:

1. Hardware and Partitioning requirements.
2. Software requirements.
3. Peculiarities of H-Sphere work under Windows 2003

Note: We don't install H-Sphere on live servers.

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 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2003 Servers, Windows 2003 Web Edition (more on Microsoft Server 2003 limitations)
   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:

• Webalizer: please download the version of Webalizer currently supported by H-Sphere. The latest version will be included into the future H-Sphere versions.
• ASP.NET (see also ASP.NET Support)
• ActivePerl
• PHP: to ensure you have all required libraries that are 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.

* Important: Upon the completion of ActivePerl and PHP installation, please check whether the read/launch permissions for built-in IUSR and IWAM accounts have been set on the destination directories and their content. This is done so the respective libraries can be run when Perl or PHP scripts are requested via http.
Also, read/launch permissions for built-in IUSR and IWAM accounts must be set to the winnt\system32 directory, as this directory contains libraries to work with ASP.

Peculiarities of H-Sphere work under Windows 2003

Please consider the following when you intend to install H-Sphere on Windows 2003 servers:

1. Once H-Sphere is installed, it sets and works with IIS 5 compatible mode. Therefore features of IIS 6 are not available so far.
2. In the current H-Sphere versions Shared SSL on Windows 2003 server is not working. It is not an H-Sphere issue, but a Windows 2003 specific work with Shared SSL.
3. CDONTS object library is not working on Windows 2003. We recommend to use CDO instead of CDONTS on all Windows servers since CDO is a newer and more flexible library.