YAFPC-Appliance

The Network PDF Server on a bootable CD Download Burn Boot Configure Print!

Administrators Manual

Version 7.03 (06.09.2010)

Contents
First Steps ........................................................................................................................................ 4 Download and burn the CD .............................................................................................................. 4 System Requirements ....................................................................................................................... 5 Running as Standalone Server .......................................................................................................... 5 Running in a Virtual Machine ........................................................................................................... 5 Booting the System .......................................................................................................................... 5 First Configuration Steps................................................................................................................ 10 Setting up the Network Connection ................................................................................................ 11 Domain Name ................................................................................................................................ 12 Workgroup / Windows Domain ...................................................................................................... 12 External Storage Settings ............................................................................................................... 12 System Settings .............................................................................................................................. 13 System Time .................................................................................................................................. 13 System Update ............................................................................................................................... 14 Mail Settings .................................................................................................................................. 14 Mail Aliases ................................................................................................................................... 16 Using LDAP Query for Email Addresses ........................................................................................ 17 Uploading Aliases from a Text File ................................................................................................. 17 Adding Email Aliases ..................................................................................................................... 17 Uploading Letterheads, Watermarks and Appendixes ..................................................................... 18 Setting up Printers .......................................................................................................................... 18 Document Encryption .................................................................................................................... 19 Creating PDF/A Compliant Documents .......................................................................................... 20 Creating JPG Files ......................................................................................................................... 20 Delivering Documents.................................................................................................................... 20 Filenames for printed Documents ................................................................................................... 20 Building Special Filenames for Documents .................................................................................... 21 Printing and Accessing Documents ................................................................................................ 21 Printer Properties ........................................................................................................................... 22 Document Size and Orientation ...................................................................................................... 22 TCP/IP Printing (LPD) ................................................................................................................... 22 TCP/IP Printer Setup on Windows Clients ...................................................................................... 22 TCP/IP Printer Setup on Linux Clients ........................................................................................... 30 Log Files ........................................................................................................................................ 35 Activating a License....................................................................................................................... 35 System Backup and Restore ........................................................................................................... 36 Installing Plugins ........................................................................................................................... 37 Advanced Topics ............................................................................................................................ 38 Installation to Hard Drive ............................................................................................................... 38 Upgrading a HD Installation........................................................................................................... 39 Troubleshooting ............................................................................................................................. 40 Hard Drive Installation failed ......................................................................................................... 40 Upgrade failed ................................................................................................................................ 41 License has been lost or fails to activate ......................................................................................... 41 System doesnt get an IP address while booting .............................................................................. 41 2

In Browser Interface dont appear buttons or dont work ................................................................ 41 I have forgotten my admin password or username .......................................................................... 41 My users cannot print to a large paper size (like A0) because it cannot be chosen in printer settings ........................................................................................................................................... 41 My users cant print any more with their virtual printers after some configuration changes Ive made .............................................................................................................................................. 42 My users dont get any email with PDF files attached..................................................................... 42

First Steps
Thank you for using YAFPC-Appliance, the Network PDF Server on a bootable CD. YAFPC-Appliance is aimed to act as a server in your network, that provides an unlimited number of network shared Printers for printing PDF documents out of all applications on client workstations in the same way network shared physical printers are used. Each shared printer provides automatic driver installation for Windows systems. On other systems any printer driver creating Post Script output can be used. Each printer can be configured to apply a cover page, letterheads, watermarks and appendixes to all created documents. The created documents are consecutive numbered and automatically sent to the printing user by email. Additionally the users printed documents are accessible in a users shared home directory on the YAFPC-Appliance, only this user has permission to access to.

Download and burn the CD

YAFPC-Appliance is available as a bootable CD image (YAFPC-<version>.iso) for download from http://www.pdfserver.net . The image file size is about 130MB. It contains a complete Linux life system with kernel 2.6.27, based on the General Purpose Appliance System ( http://www.nview.net/GPAS ), completed with YAFPC the freeware PDF Composer ( http://www.yafpc.net ), a modified edition of SAMBA the Windows Networking System for Linux ( http://www.samba.org ), a Java Runtime Environment 1.6.0_12-b04 from Sun Microsystems and an Apache Jakarta Tomcat Server 6.0.18 with a lot of Java Server Pages and libraries for a browser based Administration Interface for YAFPC-Appliance. After you have downloaded the YAFPC.iso file please burn it to a CD with Your preferred CD Burn Program. You can find on CD a lot of files and directories belonging to GPAS and a folder named ADDON. Below this folder the content for YAFPC-Appliance is located. Copy the Demo folder from this directory to your local hard disk. It contains some demo files for the first printer configuration.

Also copy this Manual.

Then insert the CD into the CD-ROM drive of the PC to be used as the Network PDF Server.

System Requirements
Running as Standalone Server
The system requirements for the Network PDF Server PC are quite low: A Pentium 500MHz with 512MB RAM, a 1GB hard disk, a CD-ROM drive and a network interface will do the work for hundreds of users in your network. Most important is enough RAM space, because the system runs from CD and the whole directory structure is mounted to a RAM-Disk. Please note: The hard disk of the YAFPC-Appliance is used for storing persistent configuration data. When first time started, the YAFPC-Appliance will REPARTITION this disk and create a Linux swap partition of 128MB and a Linux data partition of the rest of the disk capacity. You can avoid the repartitioning (and loss of all its data content), if you create and format a Linux swap partition and a Linux ext3 data partition of at least 512MB before booting from CD the first time.

Running in a Virtual Machine

Its a good choice to run YAFPC-Appliance in a virtual machine environment if available. It was tested on all kinds of VMware Virtual Machine Environments as well as on a Microsoft Virtual Server R2 and the VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems. The setup of such a virtual machine is simple: Configure a new virtual machine with a hard drive of 1GB, with at least 256MB (better 512BM) memory, a bridged network interface and a CDROM drive. Connect this CDROM drive to the downloaded ISO image YAFPC.iso and make the CDROM drive your first boot device (important!).

Booting the System

It is assumed you have no Linux partitions on your hard disk and can accept the loss of all its data. Insert the CD into the drive and power on.

The system will boot the GPAS system after showing the YAFPC-Appliance splash for about 10 seconds.

After recognizing the hardware environment and loading the appropriate drivers it will become aware of the very first start, while not finding its configuration directory on hard disk. After booting the underlying GPAS operating system, which is distributed under GPL, you must read and accept the License Agreement of YAFPC-Appliance before installation can start.

You can leave the License Agreement by typing q and accept the agreement by typing accept then.

Continuing the installation process the system will repartition your first hard disk. It will print out a message about this and encourage you to power off, if you dont want YAFPC-Appliance to repartition your hard disk.

Powering off now is the LAST CHANCE for you, to avoid LOSS OF ALL DATA on your disk! After pressing any key, the system will continue.

If you accept repartitioning by typing repartition now, the system will remove all existing partitions, create and format new ones.

After this a reboot is initiated. Please make sure your CD-ROM drive is still the first boot device! Otherwise the system will not boot. This time the system will display the License Agreement again (Please accept once more. Later it will not be shown any more.), then it will create all required configuration data on the hard drive and try to get an IP address via DHCP.

If no IP address could be acquired the address will be set to 192.168.0.1 with no valid gateway and DNS settings. Please access the Administration Interface of YAFPC-Appliance from any Browser over the network now. Note: There is no way to access the system from its console. All setup and configuration is made in the Browser Based Administration Interface from any browser in your local network. Your browser must accept Session Cookies and Java Script for this interface to work!

First Configuration Steps

For your first login, use admin as username and setup as password. If you are logged in, choose Admin Settings to setup a new username and password first. Java script and cookies should be enabled in your browser.

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Please note the Help link on each configuration screen in the upper right corner, giving some hints for this screen. Also note the Submit Changes button for submitting changed values to the persistent configuration store of YAFPC-Appliance. In case of submitting settings, which require a system reconfiguration, the Reconfigure System button on the lower left will change to red. Only if this button was clicked, the settings will take affect.

Setting up the Network Connection

Choose Network Settings from the left menu to proper fit-in YAFPC-Appliance into your network environment. While YAFPC-Appliance will act as a server in your network, it is recommended not to use DHCP address assignment. Please fill in proper values for IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, DNS server and WINS server here. Special attention should be paid to the Domain Name and the Workgroup/Windows Domain settings. 11

Domain Name
The domain name setting is used to build the printing users email address by assembling the users Windows account (alice) and the given domain name (test.net) to alice@test.net. For that you should apply your email domain here. In case the Windows accounts dont match the email usernames in your network, you can setup aliases (see Mail Aliases below).

Workgroup / Windows Domain

This setting is used to show YAFPC-Appliance inside your Workgroup or Windows NT Domain in your Windows network environment. For easy access to YAFPC-Appliance network shares you should also proper setup the WINS Server setting and publish the YAFPC-Appliance machine name and address by your DNS server. After changing network settings you must reconfigure the appliance by clicking the Reconfigure System button and then reconnect to the admin interface. Please dont forget to use the new IP address for reconnection!

External Storage Settings

In case you want all documents to be copied to an external storage device (Server or NAS) you can setup the required connection in the External Storage screen. YAFPC-Appliance uses CIFS (Common Internet File System) to connect to external resources.

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Use the Test Settings button to make a temporary connection from YAFPC-Appliance to the external storage device. Use the Edit Printer screen of your printers to setup the behaviour of each printer when creating documents. IMPORTANT NOTE: If Use External Storage is set, the system will try to mount the given resource on startup or reconfiguration. If the given host is reachable but the required ports are blocked (e.g. by a firewall), the system will wait for a CIFS mount timeout. This can take up to 5 minutes, while the system is not available! It is always a good practice to test settings after they were changed.

System Settings
The System Settings menu is used to update the system and to setup the system time and the time zone.

System Time
First choose and apply the proper time zone for your location.

If your YAFPC-Appliance is able to access the Internet, the system time is automatically synchronized once a day. The default settings for time servers should work in most cases. If you have a time server inside your local network, you can setup this servers address here.

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System Update
From time to time some updates and bug fixes for YAFPC-Appliance may be made public on our homepage. Only if basic operating system components are upgraded, downloading and applying a complete new CD image is required. In most cases updates will be published as update packages YAFPC-Appliance-XXX.war. The size of those packages is significantly lower (about 6MB) then the complete CD image (about 130MB).

You can upload and apply those update packages to the YAFPC-Appliance machine using the System Settings screen. Note: Please read carefully the instructions for upgrading a system published on our homepage. It is very important to understand, to what version an upgrade package is applicable. For example: Upgrading from version 2.09 to 3.02 with package YAFPC-Appliance-302.war will fail because the underlying operating system was changed. If you have enough bandwith for downloads, its always the best choice to download and apply the recent ISO image for upgrading. This will work for all versions.

Mail Settings
Use the Mail Settings screen to configure the email messages, the system sends to your users. You can apply various system variables to the email messages by inserting {{variable}} in the text. The following variables can be included into the mail subject or the mail text: {{printer}} - The name of the used printer, {{user}} - The current username, {{file}} - The filename of the printed document, {{hostname}} - The hostname of the YAFPC-Appliance machine, {{domain}} - The domain name of the YAFPC-Appliance machine, {{link}} - A link to the printed document of the form \\<hostname>\<username>\<document name>, {{http}} - A HTTP link to the printed document of the form http://<hostname>/TMP/<document name>, {{first}} - The filename of the First page letterhead, {{next}} - The filename of the Next page letterhead, {{watermark}} - The filename of the Watermark, {{append}} - The filename of the Appendix, {{title}} - The document title as given by the printing application. {{password}} - The user password for reading encrypted documents. Please note: The {{link}} variable does not work, if Store Documents to User Home is unchecked in the printer settings! 14

If the {{password}} variable is omitted and Random User Password is enabled for a printer, documents of this printer can not be read!

Please setup a proper hostname or IP address for your SMTP server. This server must accept mails from the YAFPC-Appliance machine and must perform mail relaying for users from your network. If you leave blank the SMTP server field, the system will try to deliver emails directly, using the MX record of your domain obtained from the DNS server. This will not work in some LAN environments. If the SMTP server requires the sender to authenticate you can check the Use SMTP auth. box and fill in the name and password of the account to be used for sending. In case your SMTP server listens to a port different from standard SMTP (port 25) you can add the port number to the address separated by a colon (:). In this case you need to include the host address into square brackets (see example above). With Maximum Attachment Size you can limit the size of PDF files that are attached to emails. If a document file exceeds this size it is not attached to the email.

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Mail Aliases
In case the Windows accounts dont match the usernames of your email addresses you can setup mail aliases. You can use a LDAP server or Active Directory to query email addresses from usernames, upload a textfile containing username: email@mynetwork.net pairs or manually add email aliases.

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Using LDAP Query for Email Addresses

If you have a LDAP server or Active Directory available in your local network, fill in proper values for querying email addresses here. Test your settings by invoking some username having an email address attribute in LDAP to the Username for Test field and click the Test button. In case your settings work, the email address of this user will be displayed green after Result:. If some red output appears in the Result: field this is the error output of the query command. LDAP queries are executed with the following command line:
ldapsearch -LLL -x -b <Searchbase> -h <LDAP Server/Domain Controller> -p <Port> -D <LDAP User> -w <Password> <Filter>=<Username for Test> <Attribute>

Uploading Aliases from a Text File

If you have a file containing a list of aliases, you can also upload this file. The aliases file must be plain text, containing one alias on each line. As a delimiter between username and email address the characters =, :, ; or , can be used. The file content for the screenshot above was:
alice:a.smith@mydomain.com bob.miller = bmiller@bobsdomain.net cesar.julius, julius.cesar@rom.it dj : disk@jokey.music EmilKrause , ek@krause.de foobar ; foo@bar.net

If Append to Current Aliases is checked, existing aliases are overwritten and not existing aliases are appended. Otherwise the current aliases list is removed before reading the list from file.

Adding Email Aliases

You can edit email aliases manually. Insert the users Windows account (without any domain part!) in the left field and the complete email address of this user in the right field. Then click Add Alias. To remove an alias entry click the Remove Alias button next to this entry. Important Note: To resolve the email address of a given user the system will first try to get it by a LDAP query (if enabled). If not enabled or no email address could be resolved it will search for an email address in the aliases list. If the user was not found in this list the email address will be composed from username and the domain name like setup in Network Settings.

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Uploading Letterheads, Watermarks and Appendixes

For automatic applying those files to all printed documents, you can upload them to YAFPCAppliance. For your first test you can use the files from the Demo directory, you have copied from CD to your local hard drive.

Each file can be assigned a remark after uploading. By clicking a files link it can be displayed in your browser. Please note: Letterheads must be unencrypted PDF files, containing ONE page only. Watermarks can be picture files of the format GIF, JPEG, BMP or PNG, containing ONE picture only. Appendixes can be unencrypted PDF files with any number of pages. Please see the How it Works section on http://www.yafpc.net for more information.

Setting up Printers
Go to the Printers screen and click the Add Printer button.

The Edit Printer dialog will appear.

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Here you can apply a printer name and a remark to be displayed in your network environment. Choose one of the uploaded Letterheads, Watermarks and Appendixes to be applied to this printers created documents. Also change Encryption settings and the Print Page Numbers as you wish and decide whether you want documents to be sent by email and/or stored to the users home directory. With the Attach Document setting you can induce YAFPC-Appliance to attach the created document to the mail sent to the user. If External Storage (see there) is configured, you can decide whether the printer shall copy all documents to the external storage device, create a folder for this printer and/or a subfolder for each user there. Then Submit Changes and Reconfigure System. Please note: If you want to apply the {{link}} variable in your Mail Settings, you must check the Store Documents to User Home here for the link to work.

Document Encryption
If Enable Encryption is checked all documents of this printer are encrypted and access to those documents is limited. The Owner Password (required for manipulating the document) is by default set to a random value for each document. If you want a static password to be used fill in this field. The User Password is not set by default. This means everyone can read the document. If you want documents to be readable for users only who know a password, you can setup a User Password. If Random is checked, a random value for the user password is created for each document. This password can be included in the email, sent to the printing user (see {{password}} variable in Mail Settings). 19

Creating PDF/A Compliant Documents

If PDF/A compliant documents is enabled documents created by this printer are compliant to the PDF/A-1b standard and can be used for long term archiving. Please note: This check box disables all encryption settings because encryption is not allowed in PDF/A.

Creating JPG Files

If Create JPG Files is enabled the system creates JPG images for each page of the document in addition to the created PDF file. You can chose the quality/resolution of those images in the Density drop down menu form 75dpi (default) to 600dpi. ATTENTION: Creating high resolution images for large documents will cause heavy load for the YAFPC-Appliance machine. This might result in automatic cancelling of jobs when memory or disk space are exhausted. Remember: It is created one picture per page of the document to be printed. Printing a document with 1000 pages will create 1000 JPG files when Create JPG Files is enabled for this printer. If Send Email is enabled for this printer the system will try to send an email with 1001 attached files.

Delivering Documents
A document created by a printer can be delivered in different ways: Sent by email to the printing user, sent by email to a fixed email address, copied to an external storage or to a shared home folder for each user on the appliance machine. Activate the check boxes as you wish and click Submit Changes. Please dont forget: Activating Send Email while Send to User and Send to Address are unchecked will lead to a Configuration Error message in AccessLog due to a missing email address information.

Filenames for printed Documents

The default behaviour of YAFPC-Appliance is to name the created documents after the document title given by the printing application and the user who printed this document in combination with a consecutive number, for example TestDocument-(MyUsername-123).pdf. You can change this behaviour by checking/unchecking the 3 boxes next to Build Document Filename from. Please be aware: Unchecking both, username and consecutive number will overwrite existing documents under some circumstances, when documents with the same title are printed more than once. Please note: The document title given by the application may be very large and/or may contain charcters, that are not allowed in filenames. In this case the title is changed before used in the filename like follows in the given order: Whitespaces (space, tabulator etc.) are replaced by underscore _. Document titles containing slash / or backslash \ characters are built from the characters following the last occurrence of a slash or a backslash. For example C:\mydocuments\mytext.txt is changed to mytext.txt. Characters not contained in the ISO-8859.1 character set or not allowed in filenames are replaced by a tilde ~. Sequences of tildes are replace by a single tilde. Document titles larger then 100 characters are truncated to the first 99 characters followed by a tilde.

Building Special Filenames for Documents

If you need more option for building filenames you can use the Build Filename from section in printer configuration like shown below. 20

Here you can add a fixed prefix to all filenames and apply a filter to the document title when the filename is built. Test the filter by invoking a document title and click the Test button.

Printing and Accessing Documents

After all configurations have been proper done, finally your users can print their first document. Open the Network Environment on your client workstation and find the YAFPC-Appliance machine with the hostname you gave in Network Settings. Double click this host entry. You will find the printer, you did setup above and a shared folder named after your Windows account.

Now double click the printer icon. The automatic driver installation (Point&Print) will start and the printer is ready for printing after some seconds. Open any program you can print some pages out of and print to your PDF printer. After some seconds, take a look into your home folder on the YAFPCAppliance host. It should contain a PDF document, named after your Windows account with 1 as the consecutive number. Also an email should arrive at your email client containing a message like setup in Mail Settings and with the PDF file as attachment. Some important notes: Each time a user accesses the YAFPC-Appliance host the first time, a user account and a home directory are created on the fly without the administrators interaction. The home directory is shown to this user only. While connecting, ANY password of the user is accepted. Consequently the users home directory is NOT secure against accessing by other users, if they fake this username. The created documents of a user are accessible in the users home directory for 30 minutes only. After this time the document is deleted automatically. While rebooting the YAFPC-Appliance host, all remaining documents in all home folders are removed immediately.

Printer Properties
YAFPC-Appliance comes with preinstalled printer drivers for all 32Bit and 64Bit Windows versions. Automatic driver installation in Windows clients is done with Point&Print. Normal users are not allowed to change default printer settings or install other printer drivers. They can only change the paper size and some other printer properties on a per session basis. The Administrator 21

can permit users to act as Printer Admin. Users who are in the Printer Admin list are permitted to install printer drivers, change default properties such as paper size, default orientation or print quality using the Printer Properties dialog on their Windows workstations. Those settings apply to this printer on all Workstations. Users can be added to the Printer Admin list in the Admin Settings screen of the browser interface. The list should contain the usernames (without any domain part) as a comma separated string.

Document Size and Orientation

For document size and orientation the following rules apply: If No letterheads and watermarks are applied to the printer: Size and orientation of the created PDF document are set the same like the printing application sends it to the printer on a page by page basis. When copying a plain text to the printer, the default printer settings for size and orientation are applied to all resulting pages. If a First Page Letterhead is applied to the printer: Size and orientation for all pages are set to the size and orientation of this letterhead. If the printed content of a page exceeds this size, the exceeding part of the content gets invisible. If the page size of the printed content is smaller then the letterhead size, the content of this page is centered on the resulting page. If a First Page Letterhead and a Next Page Letterhead are applied to the printer: Size and orientation for all pages are set to the size and orientation of the First Page Letterhead. The Next Page Letterhead is resized to fit this size and orientation. If a Next Page Letterhead only is applied to the printer: This Next Page Letterhead acts as a First Page Letterhead also. If a Watermark is applied to the printer: The watermark is resized to fit on a page by page basis while keeping its aspect ratio. Additionally the watermark is centered on the resulting page. You can see a sample document demonstrating the size and orientation handling on http://www.pdfserver.net/samples.php .

TCP/IP Printing (LPD)

It is possible to access printers on the PDF server directly with the TCP/IP printing protocol (lpd, port 515). This might be necessary for a client machine not running Windows or when a user needs to have his own printer driver with some special configuration not used for other users.

TCP/IP Printer Setup on Windows Clients

In this chapter a step-by-step description of the setup procedure for a Windows 2003 server system is given. On other operating systems the same protocol settings have to be used.

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Open the Printers & Faxes folder and click the Add Printer button:

Click Next, choose Local Printer and unselect automatic detection.

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Click Next, choose Create a new Port and select Standard TCP/IP Port.

Then click Next to get the Add Standard TCP/IP Printer Port Wizard.

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Click Next again.

Type the hostname or IP address of your YAFPC-Appliance and optionally choose a different port name.

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Click Next, select Custom and then click Settings.

In Port Settings select LPR and enter the name of the printer on your YAFPC-Appliance machine you want to connect to in the Queue Name field. Select LPR Byte Counting Enabled, and then click OK.

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A Dialog for the printer driver installation will appear. Here you can select any Postscript driver, you want to use. You can also import not listed drivers, using the Have Disk button.

Note: Only Postscript (PS) drivers will work. Other printer drivers will produce unreadable output. If you want to use the standard Ghostscript PDF driver, used for the Point&Print driver installation of YAFPC-Appliance, you can import the ghostpdf.inf file. Additionally a file named ghostpdf.ppd is needed. To get these files, download Ghostscript from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get853.htm (You can use any package there), unpack it and find the files in the lib directory.

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After installing the driver decide whether to share the printer from your machine and click Next.

Print a test page (should create a PDF document on YAFPC-Appliance).

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Finally Finish the Add Printer Wizard.

Now you have a printer, whose settings are locally stored on your client machine.

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TCP/IP Printer Setup on Linux Clients

In this chapter a step-by-step description of the setup procedure for a Linux KDE system is given. Open the Printer Manager.

Click Add Printer/Class to get the Add Printer Wizard.

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Click Next and select Remote LPD Queue.

Click Next, invoke the IP address or host name of YAFPC-Appliance in the Host field and the printer name in the Queue field.

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Click Next and select Postcript Printer.

Click Next and then click Test to print a test page. Note: For security reasons sharing the home directory of the root account over the network from YAFPC-Appliance is disabled. Therefore a user named root, regardless being on a Windows, Linux or Mac client cannot access his printed documents in a shared folder. As you normally setup the printer as root, the test page will be sent to root@yourdomain.lan or its alias but not being seen in the Samba Network Environment.

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Now click Next choose banner pages as you wish.

Click Next again and set up quotas when needed.

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Click Next and setup user access as needed.

Click Next and invoke a printer name.

Then click Next and Finish. That was all. 34

Log Files
The administrator can obtain information about created documents, system errors and admin settings by accessing the Log files section. In case of reporting bugs to YAFPC-Support (support_at_nview.net), please download all log files from the YAFPC-Appliance host and attach them to your bug report email.

Note: In case you have a small Linux partition (minimum 512MB) on your YAFPC-Appliance host only, you should perform Clear Log file from time to time for each log file.

Activating a License
YAFPC-Appliance is shareware. In unlicensed state all created documents will contain a watermark Created with YAFPC-Appliance unlicensed. To get rid of this watermark, you can request a 30-Day Test License for free on the YAFPC-Appliance homepage http://www.pdfserver.net . After request you will get an email, containing a license file and an activation number, within some minutes. To activate this license please choose Admin Settings, insert the activation number and the path to the license file and click Activate License.

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After activating, your name and email address will be displayed in the license field.

If you want to use YAFPC-Appliance after expiration of the 30 Day Test License, you must purchase a Permanent License. A license can be purchased for only $99 from various online shops with a large number of payment options. Please look at our homepage http://www.pdf-server.net for more information.

System Backup and Restore

You can backup and restore your system settings and uploaded files. In case of a system crash or a configuration failure you can upload a previously created (and downloaded) backup file from your local machine and restore the complete system state. Navigate to Backup/Restore and click the Create Backup now button. A link to the new backup file will appear. Click this link to download the backup file to your local machine.

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Please dont rename this file! In case you want to restore your system, simply choose the downloaded backup file from your local hard drive and click Upload and Restore. After uploading the appliance will reboot into the restored system state. IMPORTANT NOTE: 1. The system backup file contains no license information. When the installed license information of your appliance was lost due to a hardware failure, the license must be activated again. 2. The backup file contains all passwords (admin password and password for external storage etc.) in a plain text file. Make sure to keep this backup file in a secure place!

Installing Plugins
You can use Plugins for enhancing the functionality of YAFPC-Appliance. Plugins are digitally signed modules that are installed to the harddrive and initiated at boot time. As a first set of plugins several versions of VMware Tools are available. Installed in a virtual machine environment VMware Tools provide the functionality to cleanly startup and shutdown the YAFPC-Appliance when starting up or shutting down the VMware Server or the VMware host machine. To install or uninstall a plugin choose Plugin Management from the left menu. When installing find the downloaded plugin file on your local harddrive and click Upload and Install. The YAFPCAppliance will reboot and initiate the plugin.

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More plugins may follow in the near future. Check from time to time for available plugins on http://www.pdfserver.net .

Advanced Topics
Installation to Hard Drive
YAFPC-Appliance was designed to run as a live system from a CD image. The HD of the YAFPCAppliance host is only used for storing configuration data and temporary used files. Nevertheless you can install the CD image to the hard drive if you wish. This is completely optional but can improve system speed and reliability when running _not_ in a virtual machine environment. In virtual machines the HD installation will have no effect because the virtual CD-ROM uses a CD image located on the hard drive of the VM host. In case you have allowed YAFPC-Appliance to repartition your hard drive when first time booted (see Booting the System), the partitioning of your HD was created as follows: First partition (/dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1) is an empty ext3 partition of 156MB, Second partition (/dev/hda2 or /dev/sda2) is a swap partition of 128MB, Third partition (/dev/hda3 or /dev/sda3) is an ext3 partition of the rest of disk space and is used to store all configuration data. When rebooting after this initial installation, the system will look for the empty first ext3 partition. If found _and_ if this partition is large enough to keep the CD content, it will display a message on its console about enabling a HD installation:

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If you do nothing, the system will continue without installation after 20 seconds. You can install the CD image to HD while typing install in this stage.

The system will reboot after copying the CD content to HD. Please dont forget to remove the CD while rebooting and make sure your BIOS is set to use the CD-ROM as first and the HD as second boot device (Important!!!!). From now on the system will boot and run from HD.

Upgrading a HD Installation
If a new CD image is released (take a look at http://www.pdfserver.net from time to time) it is recommended to upgrade the HD installation. You can do this by inserting the new CD into the CDROM drive and rebooting. The system will then boot from CD and recognize the HD installation having a lower release date then the CD image. It will show a prompt allowing an upgrade of the HD:

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If you type upgrade at this prompt the system will copy all files from CD to HD and reboot. Dont forget to remove the CD while rebooting. If you dont type upgrade the system will power off after 20 seconds, because it can not run from CD and HD at the same time. Either remove the CD (if you dont want to upgrade) or boot again and type upgrade at the prompt within 20 seconds.

Troubleshooting
Murphys Law: If anything can go wrong, it will!

Hard Drive Installation failed

In some rare cases, especially on machines with an older BIOS or hard drive, the boot manager installed to hard drive might fail to boot from the HD after installation. If you are familiar with Linux and have a Linux Live CD available, you can boot a Linux Live System and try to configure the lilo boot manager to proper boot from your HD. If not, the only way to get your system running again is to uninstall it from HD: Insert the CD and boot. The system will recognize the CD and HD having the same release date and prompt to a message where uninstalling is available:

If you type uninstall at this stage, the HD installation will be uninstalled and the system will run from CD again. Note: In fact there is nothing being uninstalled but the HD installation is marked as uninstalled. Thus the HD partition is not empty and the HD installation option will not be displayed again. 40

Upgrade failed
Its always a good choice to make a backup of your configuration before upgrading AND its always a good choice to test the backup by restoring it! If a restore action doesnt show any error messages and the system reboots properly, you are save to try an upgrade. If you have upgraded from an upgrade package and you want to return to the previous version by some reason: Restore your backup and check Restore Main Program while restoring. If you have upgraded using a new CD image and you want to return to the previous version by some reason: Restore your backup, check Restore Main Program while restoring and change to the old CD image while rebooting after restore has done. If the system doesnt work at all after upgrading (doesnt boot or run at all): Boot any system (Linux live system, MS-DOS diskette or whatever you can use to access the hard drive) and remove all partitions of the HD. Then use the YAFPC-Appliance CD-ROM and make a clean new installation. Then restore your backup and activate your license again.

License has been lost or fails to activate

Send an email to support@n-view.net providing your activation number or the email address used for requesting the license. Youll get an email with the license attached as ZIP file. Unzip this file and activate your license.

System doesnt get an IP address while booting

Check you network, cabling, DHCP server, router, firewall and what else is running in your local network. If this doesnt help, check again by booting a Linux live system with kernel 2.6.27 on the YAFPC-Appliance machine and check whether the network interface is recognized and properly activated. If not, the kernel 2.6.27 might not have a driver module for this hardware. Change to another NIC then.

In Browser Interface dont appear buttons or dont work

RTFM! ;-) You have to allow Java Script in your browser.

I have forgotten my admin password or username

Find the file config.xml on the hard drive (by booting a Linux live system) or in the backup file (by unpacking it). You can see the admin user name and password as plain text in it.

My users cannot print to a large paper size (like A0) because it cannot be chosen in printer settings
Try to talk to your users: There is absolutely no need to print to large paper sizes; we have no paper here. They can print to ANY paper size if they choose a large resolution (e.g. 2400 dpi) in printer settings and something like resize to page fitting in the print dialog of their application. The created PDF document can then be zoomed to any format without loss of details. Help them trying out some different settings. If your users wont listen to you: Setup a LPD printer on some server in your network, using the ghostpdf.inf file for driver installation like mentioned in TCP/IP Printer Setup on Windows Clients and share this printer in your network. Users will have a large number of paper sizes to choose from (incl. A0) in this printers setup.

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My users cant print any more with their virtual printers after some configuration changes Ive made
Tell your users to remove their PDF printers from their Printers and Fax Machines folder and let them install the printers again by Point&Print on the YAFPC-Appliance machine in your network. Then hope they manage that!

My users dont get any email with PDF files attached

Check the Mail Log of YAFPC-Appliance for delivery errors. Check the log file of your SMTP server for delivery errors. Check the aliases setup in YAFPC-Appliance. Check the Junkmail folders of your users for having the PDF mails inside ;-) HAVE FUN WITH YAFPC-Appliance And Thank you for using it!

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