cFos Personal Net documentation - Basic setup

Basic setup

The most basic setup is to install cFos PNet and copy the documents you want to publish to the folder named "pub" in the cFos PNet installation folder. In the standard configuration the JavaScript makedir.jss produces a nice output of the pub folder for your users.

You can change the location of the public and private folder by setting the keys "public_dir=" and "private_dir=" in cfospnet.ini, section [param] to your desired folder (full path required). cfospnet.ini is located in the c:\programdata\cFos\cfospnet folder.

By default cFos PNet uses port 80 for HTTP services, but you can change the port by setting the key "server_port" in the [param] section of the cfospnet.ini.
Also by default, cFos PNet uses IPv4 as well as IPv6. If you want to limit its connectivity to IPv4 or IPv6 you can set the key "ipv4_allowed" or "ipv6_allowed" to "0" in the same [param] section of cfospnet.ini.

If you want to send mail via JavaScript, you also need to set the following keys in the [param] section:

"smtp_server"	address of your SMTP server
"smtp_username"	your user name
"smtp_password"	your password
"smtp_port"	port of the SMTP server, e.g. 25. If you omit the smtp_port parameter, the default port will be used

That's it. To allow others to access your web server, you may need to configure port forwarding in your router, if you are behind a NAT. Also: If you use dynamic IP addresses, you may want to sign up with a dynamic DNS service, like DynDNS (www.dyndns.org). We provided a script to register with DynDNS when cFos PNet starts and unregister when it stops. To use it, run dyndns.htm in your pub folder to tell cFos PNet your DynDNS parameters. Then activate dyndns.jss as startup and shutdown script in cfospnet.ini by removing the ";" in the respective "on_start" and "on_stop" line in the section [scripts].

Use On-the-fly password encryption by beginning your passwords with an additional "!" sign. Whenever cFos PNet or the scripts encounter a password with "!" it will be automatically encrypted, so there are no clear text password files on your PC. Beware that this doesn't provide strong security, because cFos PNet must know the decryption method and therefore an attacker could extract the password. Encoding is however done with a random value, chosen by cFos PNet once for each installation and stored in the file master_pwd.ini in the cFos PNet installation folder.
So don't let others see this file! By using a nearly unique random value to encode passwords it is very unlikely that someone who finds encoded passwords can decode them (unless he/she also has the master_pwd.ini file).
The master_pwd value is also stored in the registry to survive a complete uninstallation. In addition, if you want to use the same master_pwd value for a new installation, you can copy/backup the file master_pwd.ini and (before starting the new installation) put this file into the same folder as cFos PNet's setup.exe.

cFos PNet as a system service

If you manually start cfospnet.exe, it runs as a normal Win32 user process under your user account. When you log out, Windows will stop it as all other programs you opened.
You can also use cFos PNet as a system service. Then it will start with Windows and run independently of the logged on user. Use

"cfospnet.exe -start_service" to register cFos PNet as a service and start it.
"cfospnet.exe -stop_service" to stop the cFos PNet service and unregister it.

User setup

cFos PNet comes with a default user setup. The installer creates a folder /users/admin in the pub folder during installation. New users get a configuration file profile.txt in their respective user folder /users/. They also get a folder /private/.
So if you want to share a file only with a certain user, copy it into his /private/folder instead of the pub folder. The .htaccess configuration then allows access to the file only after the user provided his/her username and password. The user can also upload into this folder (after entering the correct password). You can create and delete users and set their passwords, by using /users/index.htm as user "admin".