HOMEBASE SOLUTION COMMISIONING GUIDE
The profile is transmitted to the nearest SMTP Mail Transport Agent (MTA)
which is responsible for relaying that SMTP Email to the eventual destination
Homebase.
While the profile is being relayed by successive MTA’s the SMTP email may be
stored, copied, replicated many times and will be subject to the variation of
service quality provided by email servers.
For adhoc profile uploads the Homebase server provides, via its web interface,
the ability for profiles to be uploaded on demand by an authorised user.
3.5 Planning for Homebase Proxy Server Deployment
In some data centres network subnetting is used to provide a level of security
against data leakage across servers and it may be possible that a direct
connection cannot be formed from the Homebase agent to the Homebase
server.
In such cases, the Homebase Proxy Server can be deployed within the subnet
to act as the ‘collector’ for Homebase agents deployed. The Homebase Proxy
Server will form a point-to-point real time connection between a Homebase
agent and a Homebase server and not store the transmitted profile in any way.
If a Homebase Proxy Server is deployed on a subnet it can be used to form a
point-to-point connection between the Homebase agent and the Homebase
Server when the SMTP protocol is selected, overcoming some of the concerns
and issues associated with using SMTP and its reliance on third party mail
servers.
3.6 Network Requirement Planning
The average Homebase agent profile size is approximately 3-5M in size. This
size is provided as an average guide and will vary according to the size of the
server that the agent is deployed to:
The Homebase agent features that can impact profile size are:
[1] Excessive use of the Cataloguing feature
[2] Excessive use of the Customer Collections feature
[3] Large amounts of storage attached (Terabytes)
[4] Large Active Directory deployments (Windows Only)
In almost all cases the server transmitting profiles only require 100MB
connectivity with the Homebase server.
If the Homebase server it to provide by FTP and SMTP profile transmission
capability separate network cards will allow a level of load balancing to occur
across each interface. Some network cards also offer the possibility of teaming
(virtual IP addresses) that provide a level of redundancy should a network card
fail for any reason.
As the Homebase server interfaces will always provide a performance pinch-
point a higher specification network adapter is recommended. Gigabit Ethernet
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