Bindings

A binding is the mechanism by which user's can connect to Perceptive Enterprise Search. Each web site needs to have at least one binding, but it can have more as required. Perceptive Enterprise Search supports two binding mechanism, IP and IIS bindings. When running Perceptive Enterprise Search as a standalone installation, you will use IP binding. If you are integrating with an existing website host in IIS, you may opt for an IIS binding.

IP Bindings

An IP binding is the default binding mechanism. This involves Perceptive Enterprise Search "binding" to a particular IP and Port combination. A user can then access the website using http://ip:port naming convention.

IP Address

The IP address for this website to listen on. Specify "*" to bind this site to all IP addresses on the server. Perceptive Enterprise Search will attempt to listen on all specified IP addresses and report its listening status in the server error log.

If Perceptive Enterprise Search fails to bind to an IP address specified here, it will soft-fail on the IP address and/or port that it cannot bind to. Perceptive Enterprise Search will then attempt to report a reason for the binding failure, i.e.: IIS is already bound to this IP / port. These errors will appear in the Perceptive Enterprise Search Server error log. The default location for the server error logs is %SYSTEM32%\LogFiles\ISYSweb

Host Name

You can assign multiple host names, also referred to as domain names, to one computer using a single IP address. Perceptive Enterprise Search will use the host name to determine which site to connect to when multiple sites are listening on same IP address and port combination.

Port

The TCP/IP port number for HTTP requests. Default is 80.

NOTE: The standard port for HTTP traffic is 80. The alternate port is 8080. Using non-standard ports may not allow some users access to your websites, as some corporate firewalls may block traffic on non-standard ports.

SSL Port

The TCP/IP port number for HTTPS (SSL) requests. The default is 443. To use SSL, you must have correctly installed your SSL certificates. See Server Certificates for details.

IIS Bindings

An IIS Binding allows you to have Perceptive Enterprise Search nested inside IIS. There are many reasons that you may wish to do this, including:

Seamless integration into existing IIS websites
Requests are tunneled through, requiring only one externalized web server (IIS)

An IIS binding is bound to an IIS website or virtual directory. Once Perceptive Enterprise Search has bound to it, all web requests will be routed to Perceptive Enterprise Search, with IIS handling limited functionality.

New Folder Name

Specify a new virtual folder name that will be created for Perceptive Enterprise Search to bind to.

Parent Folder

Contains a list of all websites and top level folders currently in IIS. Select the item that should be the parent folder to the new virtual folder.

When binding to IIS, if the Parent Folder list is empty, when creating a new site, or the IIS Server box is empty, when adding a binding to an existing site, then Perceptive Enterprise Search cannot find your IIS Server. Ensure you have IIS installed and it is accessible from this machine. If so please refer to Integrating With IIS for more assistance.

Please note that once Perceptive Enterprise Search has bound to a folder, all requests will be handled by Perceptive Enterprise Search. Pages that were served by the folder will no longer work. It is recommended that you create a new folder just for Perceptive Enterprise Search.

If you have any problems binding a website to IIS, or if you are using IIS 7 or higher, please refer to the Integrating With IIS page.