This article describes the requirements of PowerFolder Server regarding hardware, operating systems and third party software. Please check the requirements deeply to not encounter problems during installation or in production use.
Hardware Requirements
There is no general recommendation on hardware requirements for PowerFolder Server, since it all depends on the number of folders and files which should be managed. Therefore we just provide a rough figure here on how to scale the hardware for PowerFolder Server.
If you manage about 1.000.000 files, the following hardware is recommended:
- Dual- or Quad-Core CPU, > 2 GHz
- 2-4 GB RAM
PowerFolder Server only requires about 100MB of disk space for the program itself. The disk space for the data has to be scaled according the expected data which should be managed by PowerFolder Server.
If there are problems starting the server due to memory problems or if you need information how to increase the amount of memory to PowerFolder Server, please read the section about Server - Memory Configuration.
Network Requirements
PowerFolder needs the following ports to be opened:
- TCP / 443: Web Interface HTTPS
- TCP / 80: Tunnel HTTP for data exchange between clients behind a firewall and the server
- TCP / 1337: Data for data exchange between clients and the server
Changing port numbers
The above mentioned ports can be changed of course. You can either change them as an administrator in the web interface or via the Server Configuration File.
Exchanging data via the HTTP Tunnel
You might ask yourself, why there is a need for a port opened which serves the web interface without a SSL certificate.
In case the client is behind a firewall, which blocks all ports except port 80, the client encrypts his data packets for exchange with the server using the PowerFolder-internal transfer protocol (same procedure as for packets being directly exchange via the normal data port) and sends his data packets via HTTP POST against the non-SSL URL of the server. If the client would send it against the SSL-protected URL (e.g. http://powerfolder.example.com/rpc), the data exchange would be encrypted twice, which means the data transfer would slow down, because the data packets would be encrypted by the PowerFolder-internal protocol and the SSL connection.
Serving the web interface on Linux-based operating system
On Linux-based systems it's not possible for a non-root user to bind to ports below 1024 as those ports are considered "privileged". Therefore you need to either put a web server like Apache or Nginx in front (
recommended) or choose PowerFolder ports higher than 1024 .
Software Requirements
| Operating Systems | |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Windows |
|
| Linux / Unix / Solaris | Debian, Redhat, SLES, Ubuntu |
| Databases | |
| Microsoft SQL | 2012 / 2014 / 2016 / 2017 |
| MySQL | 5.7 |
| PostgreSQL | 9.3 |
| Browsers | |
| Edge |  42 and higher |
| Internet Explorer |  11 and higher** |
| Mozilla Firefox | 3.6 and higher |
| Google Chrome | 10 and higher |
| Safari |
|
*Because of the huge amount of distributions we are limiting our support and tests to Gentoo and Ubuntu LTS distributions.
** Some functions aren't working correctly on Internet Explorer 11. Especially the settings can't get configured with this browser. Please use for configuration Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Safari.