The Spider Business Center (SBC) is an integrated, secure solution for online subscription and management of all GNSS network services. It smoothly integrates GNSS Spider and Leica X-pos services and allows you to complement them with your own value adding benefits.
The Spider Business Center Web Frontend provides you and your clients with tools to administer and subscribe GNSS real time and post-processing services. It is designed to monitor service usage, to enable exchange of data, to view online network and rover status.
The GNSS Spider Network Server connects to SBC. It submits the available products to SBC, where these can then be combined into articles. Registered end users can subscribe these articles or they can be assigned by administrators, who also authorize subscription requests.
Please refer to the Leica Spider Suite Installation Guide for details.
The SBC Central Server is responsible for all the core business logic including database management. It processes and manages all configuration, registration, access and authorization requests. It stores all related data within its exclusive SQL database installed on the same computer. It is usually installed on the same computer as the GNSS Spider Network Server but also the distributed installation is supported.
The SBC Proxy Server acts like a broker between SBC Web Frontend and Central Server. It takes care for secure communication between the SBC Central server and Internet users.
The SBC Proxy Server is designed such that it is ideally suited for a secure IT network installation, where connections from an Intranet to the Internet are secured with software and/or hardware firewalls creating a so-called DMZ (De-Militarized Zone). The SBC Proxy Server is usually installed in a DMZ like the GNSS Spider RTK Proxy Server and Leica X-pos.
The SBC Web Portal provides the graphical user interface (GUI) for the configuration and management functionality of SBC. As a Web service, it can be accessed via the latest versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft® Edge (Chromium-based) or Safari. It is recommended to keep the browser updated.
It is always automatically installed with the SBC Proxy Server and requires the Microsoft® Internet Information Service (IIS) to be installed and activated on the same computer.
The SBC user interface is designed using HTML5 & CSS3. The UI styles like colours, images & font styles are customizable as per the requirements to resemble your corporate theme.
In version 5.2 of SBC and GNSS Spider the communication between both components has been reworked. The Network Server now directly connects to the Central Server of SBC. This direct route improves the performance of data exchange as well as the support of particular security rules increasingly requested for distributed software installations.
This direct route requires the location of the SBC Central Server to be set correctly on the Network Server of GNSS Spider. Both IP-address and hostname is supported. The port number 8023 must not be set. Spider is doing this internally while establishing the connection to SBC. This kind of connection is used for Rover user authentication and data synchronization – particularly the content and status of reference sites and RT-products.
The SBC Proxy Server connection is an optional setting on the Network Server. It is required to provide the real time rover data as input for the Rover Live view in SBC. By keeping this setting empty the Rover Live view will stay empty as well.
In the previous versions 5.0 and 5.1 the connection between SBC and the Network Server was exclusively established via the SBC Proxy Server. Any rover authentication check between Network Server and SBC user data base happened on an indirect route. The following figure illustrates the obsolete connection flow.
To check Rover user authentication was established exclusively via the SBC Proxy Server. The settings at the Network server were accordingly different.
The following diagram illustrates the control flow between all components of the GNSS Spider Suite. It also summarizes the used IP-ports which helps the IT-department to configure routes and firewalls accordingly.
