What's New in Director 8.5 > The Server Application > About administering the server |  |

About administering the server

In order to run the server successfully in a network environment, it is important that you or your network administrator understand how the server interacts with the rest of the network and what features of your network the server depends on.

If your server is installed behind a firewall and you want to allow users outside the firewall to connect, you must make sure your firewall is set to allow incoming traffic on the port number that the server uses. By default, this is port 1626. You can choose another port number and configure the server's Multiuser.cfg file to use it, but you must be sure no other application on your server computer will try to use the same port number as the server. If your network uses a proxy server, it must also be configured to allow incoming traffic on the port that the Multiuser Server is using.

To ensure that your server will always be available to users in the event of a hardware or software failure, you can implement a redundant server installation by using two servers on two computers and connecting them with a third-party load-balancing solution. These include products such as Central Dispatch™ from Resonate and Local Director™, a hardware tool from Cisco Systems.

You can set up the server to start automatically after a hardware restart by adding a server alias to the Startup Items folder in the Macintosh System Folder or a server shortcut to the Startup folder in Windows. This will cause the server to restart any time there is an unplanned hardware restart, such as those caused by power failures.