If you setup Chorus server on your own network, please be aware the speed and degree to which our support service can investigate problems depends entirely on how easy you make it for us to connect to your server.
Most issues can be solved if we have direct HTTP/HTTPS access.
System level issues are likely to need SSH access.
Planning ahead to put in place an arrangement by which Third Light can reach your server(s) in an emergency will make the greatest impact on our ability to help you quickly and efficiently.
Definitions
| Remote access | Making firewall or other network arrangements that allow Third Light to reach your Chorus server over the Internet. Your IT team will be able to help with this if your system is normally only available on your local network and not over the Internet. |
| Support access | Giving permission to Third Light to be able to login to your system's web interface once they are able to reach it over the Internet. A Chorus sysadmin administrator user with access to the Chorus Manager can grant this. |
Arranging Remote Access
Ideally IT teams should think about a method by which Third Light can access your server at the same time the installation of our software is taking place. Doing this in advance means that if you have an urgent request for our support team, we can much more quickly diagnose and fix the problem as we will be able to inspect your system straight away. If we don't have remote access it is similar to asking a doctor to diagnose and treat a problem with a patient the doctor does not have physical access to study.
There are other advantages to supplying Third Light with remote access:
- Customers outside of the UK timezone can have their problems worked on during their night so that a solution or plan for a way forward is ready for them the next day.
- Customers outside of the UK timezone won't have to work early in the morning or late at night to have a live conversation with Third Light. Simply email the steps to replicate the problem to us and we will connect to your system to try it for ourselves.
- The back-and-forth of emails to collect information about the circumstances of the problem is reduced because we will be able to see the problem using our remote connection.
- Storage migrations can be performed outside of your working hours and inside ours helping to minimise potential disruption to users.
Access Methods
- Direct access via firewall rules to ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS) and 22 (SSH). We will connect from an IP address of 161.12.71.18 (IP4). This is the preferred way to grant us access.
- Indirect access via VPN client software. Please create a VPN account and issue Third Light with installation instructions and login credentials.
Our team's hope is always to be as helpful and specific as we can be, in the shortest space of time. Unfortunately, experience has shown that screen shares are not a practical substitute for remote access - efficient problem solving usually needs remote access. Planning ahead to provide option 1 or 2 immediately after the installation and before the server is handed over to its users is the single most significant action you can take to ensure we can quickly assist you.
Implementing Remote Access
Your IT team will need to know the following information:
Third Light support staff would connect to your system on ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS) and 22 (SSH).
The IP we will connect from is 161.12.71.18 (IP4).
Your Third Light server must be able to reach updates.thirdlight.com outbound. Without these your server will not be able to receive updates and our support team won't be able to login via the maintenance login (see below).
Enabling Support Access
The next step to grant access to Third Light's support engineers is to enable the option from the following page of the Chorus Manager:
Global Configuration > Third Light Support > Support access > Enable Support Access
Members of our Support team are carefully authenticated before this facility can be used. All access is audited for your peace of mind. Our login is performed via an OpenID mechanism available at https://yoursite.com/support/adminpages/maintenancelogin.tlx.
If you have any questions related to remote access, feel free to contact us at [email protected].
