Day: 4 September 2018

Posted on

Cradle SaaS

3SL Introduce ‘Cradle Subscriptions’ .

3SL are would like to announce our latest product. The Cradle Subscriptions option is a SaaS (Software as a Service) product that that provides access to 3SL’s requirements management and systems engineering tool Cradle using remote servers. There will be no need to install software on your own company systems.

Cradle Software As A Service
Cradle SaaS

Configurations

Cradle Enterprise offers huge flexibility in terms of the modules you can choose to licence and how many of each concurrent user you’ll need. This provides ultimate flexibility. In order to provide a hosted service and keep administration simple, Cradle ‘SaaS’ will be offered in four ‘flavours’ similar to the versions available as single user products. We offer the most popular licences in collection at a set ratio depending on the number of users.

So whether you are collating requirements, designing a system model, running a dashboard or publishing a document, there’s a SaaS collection form you.

Cradle Licences CollectionEnterprise-RM BasicEnterprise-RM ProEnterprise-SE BasicEnterprise-SE Pro
FunctionsRequirements elicitation and processing.Requirements elicitation and processing with project management functions and publishingRequirements and System modelling.Requirements and System modelling,
project management functions and publishing

Shared or Dedicated

For smaller projects, at a really keen price, you can pick a shared server hosted by 3SL with a shared database backend. This is ideal to get you up and running or to give you an easy way to test the benefits of an enterprise level system. This would be a great way of quickly scaling from a single user system to an enterprise arrangement as more people onboard to you project.

For larger corporate users wanting a little more control and no shared resource, Cradle is available on a cloud server. There will be a dedicated CDS (Cradle Database Server) just for your projects. This will provide you with the full power of an enterprise system without you needing your own IT hardware or managers.

Terms

Cradle SaaS can be packaged into simple fixed term durations. These will be available from one month to sixty months. This will allow customers to budget and ensure cover for a whole host of projects. You’ll be free to finish or renew as your project needs at the end of a term.

Article UpdateD

02/10/2018 – Release of SaaS

Posted on

Remote Workers and Cradle – Connecting with SSH Tunnels

Your company is using Cradle, but you’re a remote worker – how do you connect to the Cradle server?

If you have the Cradle client utilities installed locally without a local CDS then one method, if you have an externally accessible Linux/Unix system is SSH tunnels.

To use SSH tunnels you need to “lock down” the Cradle server to use specific ports, so they’re not randomly allocated from a wide pool.  You can do this in the $CRADLEHOME/admin/ports file.

Make a note of the internal IP address of the Cradle server – we’ll use CDS_IPADDR later in this post to reference this address. (In this test environment it is 192.168.11.168)

Cradle Configuration Changes

As an example of a small Cradle system with 6 users we can configure the ports file as such. (We’re setting ports for each possible user and an extra)

CDS_UDP_PORT_NUMBER = 23960
TOOL_UDP_PORT_NUMBER = 23961
PRJMAN_UDP_PORT_NUMBER = 23962

CDS_TCP_TOOL_PORT_NUMBER   = 16161
CDS_TCP_PRJMAN_PORT_NUMBER = 16162
UTILITIES_TCP_PORT_NUMBER   = 16163-16169
WBENCH_TCP_PORT_NUMBER      = 16170-16176
CWS_TCP_PORT_NUMBER         = 21211-21217
PRJMAN_TCP_PORT_NUMBER      = 16177

This ports file needs to be copied to all the clients using this CDS.

Putty Configuration Changes

Now we can look at configuring the SSH tunnels. To do this we’ll be using PuTTY – probably the most popular Windows SSH client.

First off, click on the Category Session and enter the hostname or IP of the externally accessible box in the Host Name field.
Now expand the category SSH and click on Tunnels.
For each of the ports configured in Cradle we need to add an entry.
So, for the first one:
Source port  23960
Destination CDS_IPADDR:23960
You can leave the radio buttons alone (set to Local & Auto)
Now click the Add button.

In the Forwarded Ports box you should now have an entry similar to:
L23960     192.168.11.168:23960

Repeat this for all the other ports and we end up with a Forwarded ports section which looks like (if you scroll up and down):

Cradle Putty Tunnel Settings

L23960 192.168.11.168:23960
L23961 192.168.11.168:23961
L23962 192.168.11.168:23962
L16161 192.168.11.168:16161
L16162 192.168.11.168:16162
L16163 192.168.11.168:16163
L16164 192.168.11.168:16164
L16165 192.168.11.168:16165
L16166 192.168.11.168:16166
L16167 192.168.11.168:16167
L16168 192.168.11.168:16168
L16169 192.168.11.168:16169
L16170 192.168.11.168:16170
L16171 192.168.11.168:16171
L16172 192.168.11.168:16172
L16173 192.168.11.168:16173
L16174 192.168.11.168:16174
L16175 192.168.11.168:16175
L16176 192.168.11.168:16176
L16177 192.168.11.168:16177

Click back on the category Session, then add a name to the Saved Sessions and click on Save – so we don’t have to do this again.

If you now click on Open and login to the Linux host.
You can now use your local Cradle client with it pointed to the CDS as being on your local IP.

While you have this SSH session active, you will be able to access the CDS over the SSH tunnels.