Taking the Windchill System Offline

Description

This document describes how to take a Windchill system offline to prevent users from accessing it during maintenance activities. This solution has been tested on PDMLink / ProjectLink 8.0_M040. The example is based on using the Apache Location directive to grant access on Windchill resources only to requests coming from a specific machine, such as the Windchill server or an administrator's machine.

WARNING: This procedure does not guarantee access to the system will be restricted. Please analyze your infrastructure, needs, and test whatever procedure you put in place before use in production environments.

Resolution

1. Open Apache/conf/app-Windchill-Auth.conf

2. Add the following lines after Include conf/app-Windchill-Auth.conf
<Location ~ "/Windchill/.*">
Deny from all
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from ts-vmware.ptcnet.ptc.com
</Location>

Where “ts-vmware.ptcnet.ptc.com” is the name of the Windchill server, and “Windchill” is the Web name as specified in app-Windchill-Auth.conf. The tilde ~ indicates a regular expression match. If not included, sub locations will not match.

3. Restart Apache

Attempting to login from a different machine fails. Message "You don't have permission to access /Windchill/ on this server." The Location directive can also be used to grant or deny access to other entities such as users, groups, IP address etc. For further information, refer to the Apache documentation http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_access.html .