Help with install

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Michael Garrison replied 8 Years Ago

Hey Nissy, sorry this has gone so long without an answer!

Here's the reality of how you need to think of Rock: consider it a database-driven website at it's core. It's not a conventional "app" or program that sits on a server, waiting to be run on-demand. It's a website that needs to be always available for anyone to log into. Nobody wants to say that you need to look elsewhere for a ChMS solution, but if you're not ready to commit a system to running Rock in this way and keeping it secured, you're should really consider paying for external hosting, rather than doing it yourself. I actually advise you to consider externally hosting for your situation anyway- let someone else be responsible for security and uptime while you're home at night =)

However with this understanding, if you are going to proceed and dedicate this laptop to Rock, committing it to always being on and available (usually the role of a server rather than a workstation which may shut down or reboot overnight, etc), here's what you'll need to set up:

1) Consider the reality that you're exposing this laptop to the entire internet- please take steps to secure the laptop and keep sensitive data off of it, and always, always apply security updates

2) It needs to be either outside your network's firewall, set up to be in the firewall's DMZ, or set up on a static IP address which your firewall forwards port 443 to (80 if you're going to be sending passwords insecurely ... please don't).

3) You'll need a SSL certificate that you can install on your laptop for purposes of identifying the computer and encrypting traffic between your users and your Rock laptop (this is why we're using port 443 instead of port 80 in the above step)- I recommend a wildcard certificate so you can use it for any subdomain of your primary domain, but others have also posted about how to get a free single-domain SSL cert for free.

4) Your church needs to have a static IP address from your internet service provider...this will probably be the "WAN" ip address of your firewall

5) You either need to own a web domain (something like mychurch.org) or else be willing to memorize your static IP address

OK, assuming you've got all that done and you don't want to have to memorize your static IP address, you'll need to log into the service you used to register your web domain- services like hover.com, dreamhost.com and godaddy.com provide these services. The steps differ from service to service, but you're going to need to edit the DNS records - this is like a telephone book that lets computers turn memorable names like google.com into static IP addresses like 207.192.241.90.

You'll want to add a new "A" record for the address you want to access Rock from. For instance, if your domain is mychurch.org, you may add a new "A" record called "rock" to get rock.mychurch.org . The value should be your network's static IP address (see step 3 above and check whatismyip.org if you don't know it).

Make sure that you update your settings in "Admin tools" -> "General Settings" -> "Global Attributes" so that the Global Application Root, Internal Application Root and Organization Website are set to the correct domain names.

If you only have steps 1, 2 and 4, you can also skip the rest of this and get into Rock using your static IP address (such as 111.222.333.444) by typing in http://111.222.333.444 (obviously an invalid address, just an example) from another computer. If you just skip step 5 but do have all of steps 1-4 met, the address would instead be https://111.222.333.444 .

Please let us know how far you get and where you get stuck! And forgive one last recommendation that you consider external hosting, where I think you'll find it's easy to get up and running and be very happy with Rock! http://www.rockrms.com/Rock/Book/3/88

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