How to Specify a Backup Access Point for Your Desktop Clients

The Access Point is the domain of your CentreStack installation. You can specify the Access Point on the login screen of the Desktop Clients (Windows Client or Mac Client).

For most users, you can just set the Access Point to the external domain name (example: https://example.com) or external IP address of their CentreStack.

But one alternative use case is to have a backup access point if you are in an office where sometimes there are internet connection outages. To prevent any down-time for your CentreStack users at the office, you can add a setting on the CentreStack server to have all the Desktop Clients try to connect to the local IP address automatically if the main external URL cannot be reached.

To accomplish this, follow the steps below:

1. Ensure that your CentreStack version is higher or equal to 9.3.5204.40705 (http://www.centrestack.com/p/gce_latest_release.html). Support for a backup access point did not exist prior to this version. If your version is lower, upgrade your CentreStack to the most recent version at the top of the page.
   
   
2. Go to the CentreStack installation directory with Windows Explorer:
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Gladinet Cloud Enterprise
   
   
3. Open the web.config file inside of the "root" folder with Notepad. This is an XML (extensible markup language) configuration file for the CentreStack ASP.Net web application.
   
   
4. Right after the appSettings tag that looks like this:
   <appSettings file="branding.config">
   Add the following tag. The finished edit should look like this:
   <appSettings file="branding.config"><add key="BackupAccessPoint" value="http://127.0.0.1" />
   In this case, http://127.0.0.1 is the local IP address of your CentreStack server. If you don't know what this should be, open a command prompt window on the CentreStack server and type "ipconfig" (without quotes). When you press enter, you will see the IPv4 that you should use for the BackupAccessPoint value.
   
   
5. Save and close the web.config file
   
   
6. Restart the Desktop Clients You may need to restart the Clients a couple of times in order for the setting to truly take effect.