Our Servers
All of our server administration screens are standardized. Once you start
using the software you will immediately see that all of the screens become
intuitive and easy to maintain. Adding user accounts, printers, file sharing,
office groups, servers, IP addresses, etc. are all similar across the server
licenses.
If you don't understand some of the concepts or terms there are help screens to explain
usage.
If you have a combination server license such as a file server, mail, and fax
server running on the same pc, options like user accounts and printer setups
affect all of the servers running on the pc.
For example: You add a user account. The user account entry screen will
display the options available to the user based on the servers you have
licensed. If you have the file server license you will be able to select
office groups that the user belongs to. If the mail server is also
licensed on the pc, you will also be able to tell whether the user is allowed an
email account and enter aliases for the user. If the firewall is also
licensed you can select the services that are configured to be 'Per User' on the
firewall that the user may access as well as tell where the user is allowed to
connect to over the internet with the service.
Email Support: support@mercware.com
Firewall
The Firewall License allows you many options and features and is best
represented on the table on our home page.
You control who comes into your server and internal network and the services
they are allowed to use and who is allowed out using specific services like web
browsing, mail, ftp, etc. and where they may go on the internet.
You can log everything a user does and/or log everything that passes through
the firewall. You can block specific IP addresses and/or domains from entering
the entire firewall and block the entire firewall sending to specific IP
addresses and/or domains.
The firewall has the most features and options of all of the server licenses
we offer. However, we have made the administration of the firewall as
simple and easy as possible while giving you the tools necessary to not only
protect your internal computers but to also protect your investment in the
resources behind the firewall, ie; your employee time, and hardware abuse.
The firewall has a Status screen (as does most of our servers) that has
options to show an overview of everything you have configured or display by
category such as general setup, web server and client services, Mail services,
communication services like telnet, ftp and ssh, as well as miscellaneous and
custom services.
There is also a 'report generator' that allows you to see the log entries for
the firewall based on date, time, action taken, IP address and/or service.
This report allows you to be as specific or as general as you could wish.
We are working on adding graphical representations of the reporting for a future
release.
File Server
This server is very basic but probably allows you to easily do everything
that most companies require.
You first setup office workgroups (departments, positions, etc.) then setup users
and make them members of whatever workgroups you wish. For example: You have
20 users. 5 are in accounting, 10 are in sales, 2 in shipping, and 3
managers. You can setup accounting, sales, shipping, and management
groups. You then setup each user account and select the groups they belong
to.
The next step is to setup file server areas (share, directories, partitions,
containers, etc.) where the users store their data, run programs, etc.. Each
file server area is assigned to an office group. If the user does not
belong to the group they will not be able to 'see' anything stored in that area.
Only one group owns the area but if you have users in different groups that need
access you simply create a new group with the required users as members and make
that group the owner of the area.
You are allowed to protect an 'area' so that it may only be read and nothing
else may be stored there. Once you place all of the information in the
area that you know will not change, you simple click the 'Read Only' check box
and from that point on (unless you later uncheck that box) nobody will be able
to remove or change that information.
You are also able to control whether or not the 'area' shows up on the
workstation's Network Neighborhood screen for the file server. This allows you to use
the "Map a network drive' option in Microsoft Windows™ to map a drive
letter to the server 'area' (Example: map F: to \\myserver\hideme)
instead of having it show up on the Network Neighborhood (hidden area).
One of the most feature packed options on the file
server is the printer setup screen. You can very easily connect a
printer to a workstation, the network via a print server hardware device, the
server itself, and/or to a server located in a different office or even over the
internet. Sound hard? Picture 4 entry boxes and one pull down menu.
That is all it takes to setup a printer, it's print queue and how to connect to
it. We've never seen any other printer setup that is as simple and yet
allows so much flexibility.
The printer setup screen also gives you quite a lot of options. You can start
and stop the printer, start and stop users from sending to the print queue,
start and stop both the printer and users from sending to it, put everything
currently in the printer's queue on hold and allow new items to print first,
move queue entries from one printer to another, redirect new queue entries to
another printer while continuing to print items already in the printers queue,
cancel the redirection, remove items in the queue, and finally, remove the
printer and everything in it's queue.
This screen also shows the current status of the printer and/or its print
spool queue.
The last feature on the file server is the Status Screen. This screen
allows you list all user accounts currently connected to the server, show the
current status of the data 'areas', the storage usage of the hard drive, and
all services currently running on the server.
Mail Server
This server is also very simple but incredibly flexible. You setup user
accounts the same as for most of our other servers and enter aliases for the
user. For example: The user login name is johns but you want any email
addressed to johnsmith@mycompany.com
to go to johns. Simply enter 'johnsmith' in the alias box and that is it!
Using the 'Aliases/Forwarding' tab allows you to easily create email aliases
and forwarding accounts. Example: All mail addressed to 'sales' should be
sent to John, Mary, upper management, and your outside reps. The 'sales' address
is now an alias for John, Mary and also forwards 'sales' email to upper
management and your outside reps.
There is also a 'Spam Control' screen that allows you to setup email from an
outside source to be either allowed to 'relay' through your server, told to go
away, or ignored entirely.
NEW! Easily add shared
contact lists to your Microsoft Outlook and/or WebMail. The software
allows a virtually unlimited number or lists and automatically creates an
In-House shared contact list of the users you add.
NEW! Auto-Replies for every
user. Simply select a user and enter a message you wish to have displayed
when the server receives mail for the user. Don't worry about filling up
the hard disk with endless loops of replies when an auto reply goes to someone
who automatically auto-replies back or when the email is bounced back because of
a bad return address. The software tracks each auto-reply and will only
send one reply to a return email address.
Just in case you have the Mail server running behind the firewall (protected
by the firewall) and want to give it something else to do, you can also
configure it to handle printers and print queues just like
the file server license.
Fax Server
The fax server allows you to use practically any number of common faxmodems for incoming and outgoing faxes
on a single server.
Please don't bother with "controllerless" or "winmodems". These are not true
faxmodems and are not supported with our software. However, just about any real serial or USB faxmodem,
class 1 or class 2 should work well. We have found that class 1 faxmodems appear to offer the best
compatibility with other fax machines. Please click here
for compatibility information.
We use the GNU HylaFax software to manage actual receiving and sending of faxes. This software is very
efficient and well supported. We have tested servers using up to 12 USB class 1 Multi-Tech faxmodems
plus 1 serial faxmodem for sending and receiving simultaneously. The
system was able to handle a full time load sending faxes on all modems
consistently since it was installed over 2 years ago. Status reports for
the server under a full load show the server being idle for 86.2% of the time
which means that we aren't even beginning to tax it's ability.
It can handle all of your incoming faxes as well, including routing faxes to multiple users via email,
multiple fax numbers and multiple printers. For example: you can forward faxes received from a specific
client to your outside sales reps via email (using an email alias which forwards to multiple people), and/or
email to multiple specific people, and/or print the fax on multiple printers in your office or on remote
printers in branch offices via the internet, and/or send the fax to multiple fax machines.
This server was originally written as an interface to allow faxing from
mini/mainframe systems so those companies requiring a fax server of that sort
will be well served with this server. This special purpose part of the software allows you to
incorporate our server into your existing mini or mainframe environment with very little effort. Please
click here
for more information.
You may also send faxes from your network workstations using any one of a number of free or commercial
programs listed here.
Since we do not charge per user fees and many of these programs don't either, you may be able to
eliminate the expense of a multi-user/network license required by some of the more common fax products
on the market.
Another important feature of the fax server is the ability to use the
ICVerify®™ credit card software. We have integrated the use of ICVerify
so that it may be used by any number of users irregardless of the version of
ICVerify purchased. You are required, however, to use a separate Microsoft
Windows™ workstation (should be dedicated) to run the credit card program and
have a drive letter mapped to the fax server. Our software communicates to
the credit card program via this drive mapping. Our fax server can send
credit cards for approval (and refunds), perform settlements and obtain
transaction history reports.
Practically any number of users may enter credit card info directly into our secure SSL based browser
program for approvals, voids, and refunds without the need to install any special software on a
workstation. Think about it! Any workstation with a browser can use this feature securely whether
located on your internal network or via the Internet.
Also included is a built in interface that can be easily interfaced to your internal mini/mainframe
servers. The only requirement for allowing our fax server to handle credit cards for your existing
applications as
well is that you must have a custom interface written for the software you need
this function to communicate to. We have written several interfaces and
are familiar with a number of applications should you be interested in using
this included feature. Please click here
for more information.
Of course, if this server isn't too busy, you are also able to have it handle
printers and print queues just like our file server license.
Note: Some of the fax server features are under development and currently
require some manual configuration. To make this as simple as possible, we have included 'popup' windows
where you may manually edit configuration files from your browser.
Web Server
Our Web Server installation uses the industry standard Apache SSL server
software. This server is intended to be used in conjunction with our File Server
License but with a little manual configuration you could use it without the File
Server License. Perhaps a future Cybers release will include some of the File
Server tools to allow publishing your pages directly to the web server.
Currently, you create your web pages on the File Server and use Cybers to
"publish" your pages by automatically copying the File Server Share to
the specified domain on the Web Server. All rights and permissions are
automatically set for better security. This eliminates users from needing
direct access to your Web Server which also eliminates possible related security
issues.
Note: When you publish your pages from the File Server, Cybers automatically
creates a web mail account for the specified domain. All VirtualHosted
domains have their associated web mail accounts setup when the domain is added
to the web server.
The Web Server is also able to host "VirtualHosted" web mail.
This allows you to create 'fake' domains on the web server just for using web
mail.
Your web mail contact lists may automatically include shared contact lists
you create on the Mail Server.
Note: In order to use the web mail feature (http://www.domain.com/webmail/) you
must currently add users to the Web Server via the Users tab in the Cybers
program (while administering the Web Server server). Even if you have
added a user to the File Server or any other MercWare server, you still must add
the user to the Web Server. No added users will be able to login to the
Web Server for anything other than web mail (unless you share the Web Server
with another Cybers server type (ie; Web Server & File Server on the same
pc).
Email Support: support@mercware.com
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