Calibre Content Server and Windows Home Server 2011

[HughMcC]

I’ve been trying to integrate Calibre Content Server with Windows Home Server 2011.

WHS 2011 has default web sites of “Site” which does not require authentication and “Remote” which does require authentication.

To begin with I created a folder “Calibre” under “Sites” and the created the necessary rules in (IIS) URL Rewrite as detailed in the Calibre manual.
When I browse to “xxx.homeserver.com/calibre” I get the Calibre Content Server page, everything works fine and I can browse by Publisher, Authors, All Books etc.

This is great for internal home use but to enable access from the web, users need to be authenticated.

So I moved the “Site\Calibre” directory to “Remote\Calibre” and adjusted the URL Rewrite rules to match.
I can now browse to “xxx.homeserver.com/remote” remotely and log on to the WHS.
When I browse to “xxx.homeserver.com/remote/calibre” I get the Calibre Content Server home page and I can browse by Authors, Ratings, Publishers, Tags and Series as before.

… however when I try to browse to All Books or Newest I get an “Errorarseerror” message.

Anybody got any ideas what this issue might be?

When using the “Remote” default site I needed to create a “Remote\Calibre\Browse directory to make the Content Server “Home” button work. I initially thought this was a hint that the issue may be related to permissions in the “Remote\Calibre” directory but if that were the case surly I should not be able to browse by all the other categories???

[kovidgoyal]

look at the calibre server logs from Preferences->sharing over the net

[HughMcC]

Hi Kovid

Thanks for the quick reply.

I've had a look in logs you pointed me too and can see when I browse "All Books" from the non autenticaed site there is a POST logged that is missing from log from the autenticated site. (extract from logs attached)

I'm confused as to why this should be as I thought permissions were inherited.

I dont have a great knowledge of IIS and there is probably some subtelty I'm missing, perhaps around the URL Rewrite rules and ASPX as I'm seeing the following message when I monitor traffic in Fiddler -

https://192.168.0.200/remote/ErrorPa.../booklist_page

I'd be grateful for any advise anbody can offer.

[kovidgoyal]

Unfortunately, I know absolutely nothing about IIS (I'm an Apache guy), so I cannot help you further, sorry. Hopefully, someone familiar with IIS will be able to comment.

[HughMcC]

Thanks anyway Kovid.

Keep up the good work - Calibre and the Content Server are really excellent.

[j.oody]

Has anyone gotten this to work? I'm very interested in setting this up on my WHS 2011. I've got an extensive Calibre collection and would love to integrate it with WHS. I wonder if there is a walk through for just the internal home use part. I don't have to access it from anywhere but that would be icing on the cake!

[68rustang]

Originally Posted by HughMcC

...created the necessary rules in (IIS) URL Rewrite as detailed in the Calibre manual...

Can you please explain this in more detail? I am not sure exactly how to format the rules or where I should be writing them. I have tried using the ARR and URL ReWrite wizards and manually adding web.config files in the root directories and can't seem to get anywhere.

[rickhan]

Should be similar to WHS 2011, but with a newer version of IIS and ARR.

I've just started to work on this.
First question, is Calibre running as a service so that you don't need a user logged on in a Windows session?
I'd think that would be the first step.
Then use ARR to set up a reverse proxy to the Remote Web Access Web site for the server.
(server 2012SE is the successor to WHS 2011 and SBS 2011)

[domax64]

According to the posted log your rewrite rule is wrong. The request is sent to https://192.168.0.200/calibre but should be sent to http://192.168.0.200/calibre. Strange, that it works for http get commands - maybe calibre takes it as http also when it was https?