Diagram and Components

i-Planet software has three main components:

• Reverse proxy

• Platform

• Applications

For security reasons, the recommended installation is to put the reverse proxy component on a machine separate from the platform and applications; this machine is called the i-Planet gateway. The platform and the applications together are called the i-Planet server. The i-Planet server can be installed on the i-Planet gateway machine or on a separate machine.

Figure 1-1 shows a basic diagram of the i-Planet product, including the default port numbers.

Figure 1-1 i-Planet Basic Diagram

The i-Planet Gateway

The i-Planet gateway contains the reverse proxy and the optional firewall application. The gateway is configured to listen for client traffic from the Internet on port 443. The gateway uses the secure socket layer protocol (SSL) to communicate with a browser, and can be configured to use SSL to communicate with the i-Planet server.

The i-Planet Server

The i-Planet server contains the platform and the applications.The platform includes administration services, such as authentication, licensing, and logging. The applications include desktop, mail, calendar, intranet browsing, and file access. The i-Planet server is configured to listen for traffic (non-SSL) from the i-Planet gateway on port 8080 by default; it can be configured to listen for SSL traffic from the i-Planet gateway on port 443 by default.

i-Planet Clients

i-Planet clients can connect to the i-Planet gateway through the Internet or from their internal intranet. An i-Planet remote client can be directly connected to the Internet or it can be connected through a web proxy or a firewall or both to the Internet. All clients use a browser to access i-Planet software.