Redirect root CMon Server DNS or IP address to /managementserver path to display the CMon login page, instead of the standard root level IIS start page. This will allow you to access your CMon server web page, by accessing the web site at the root DNS or IP address. This method will only work if you utilize the 'Default Web Site' for installing the CMon to, and possibly won't work if you have other web sites hosted in IIS on the same server machine. Note: It is required for this method to have installed the CMon with IIS Web Server, the internal web server will not support what we are doing here; I believe this method will work for all versions of CMon since the original CMon 19.0, and supports up to 19.8.
1. Via Windows Explorer, navigate to the 'C:\inetpub\wwwroot\' folder. If that folder does not exist, then you will need to look in IIS Manager to see what your default root www folder was custom set to, and then navigate to that wwwroot folder. By default all versions of IIS utilize the 'C:\inetpub\wwwroot\' folder, so unless you custom installed or modified it after the fact that listed path should be the active one.
2. Copy the existing 'iisstart.htm' to a new file, as to back it up in the same folder, or make a backup of it by zipping that file, this is the only file we will be modifying.
3. Using notepad.exe or NotePad++ app (the later is recommended, and what is used in the examples), edit the existing file 'iistart.htm'. The file will look like this by default, if nothing else was modified, which it normally would not be:
4. Go to line 4 and add a new line under it, so that new line would be located between the existing '<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" ...>' line of text, and the line below it which starts with '<title>...'. Once that new line, which would be line 5 that is currently blank, has been added you will copy the following first line of text in the code block, that starts with <meta and contains "refresh">, which is our example, but just realize that the line you are copying will require editing on your end to have it be correct to match your installed CMon Server Address, and actually work:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://cmon-server-address.com:8080/managementserver">
<title>NovaBACKUP CMon</title>
5. Copy the entire first line of text in the above example code block and paste it as the new line 5 in your isstart.htm file, like this:
6. While referencing the above screenshot example, that contains the new line 5, in your own isstart.htm, edit the newly copied line 5 for the url= portion of the statement, and replace the address with the actual DNS or IP address of your CMon server including the port if needed (you only need to specify the actual port if it is a non-standard port, so not if it is either port 80 for HTTP, or port 443 for HTTPS, then in that case specifying the port is not required, as the protocol prefixed at the start of the url= string already contains HTTP or HTTPS to know what the standard ports are there).
7. The below example iistart.htm file contents contains a line 5 with the url being entered without a port, in that case the port utilized is based on just the http: protocol since that uses port 80 by default. If you use the standard https port which is port 443, then you don't need to specify the port like in the Step 5 screenshot, where it shows :8080 in the url= string, you just need to have the start of the url= contain https for it to utilize port 443:
7. This step is completely optional, but as you can see in the code block at the bottom of Step 4, and in all of the example screenshots, it shows a new # 6, so for Line 6 we show that the Title of the website can be changed, and this title is ONLY ever seen very briefly, in two cases, when you attempt to access the CMon at the root server address (without /managementserver appended in the URL), in the brief second that it takes to perform the redirect that you are actually implementing with this how-to, and the other example case where you will see this is if you have just restarted the 'Management Server' service, which is the CMon's service, and you attempt to access the website before it gets the chance to fully load up (if you have a lot of agents and records for example, likely you won't notice it with only a few agents and records) or for a clean install. Here we see highlighted in red at the top left of this first screenshot, the example of a default IIS Web Server setup, where iisstart.htm contains the default <title> value variable, of 'IIS Windows Server' for the title:
And here we see highlighted in yellow at the top left of this second screenshot, the example of if you go ahead and modify Line # 6 in iisstart.htm, where iisstart.htm contains the custom <title> value variable, of 'NovaBACKUP CMon' for the title (which is in our code block example at the bottom of Step 4 that you can utilize):
8. Save the iisstart.htm file after your changes are made. Now verify that your changes were made now by first opening the same file in your notepad editor just to see that the changes on line 5 and 6 were saved, if so then exit the notepad. The changes here will be instant the next time you attempt to access the root website address of IIS web server, so in that case you would be accessing the web server at the root server (machine level) address so http://cmon-server-address.com in our example (which is a fictitious address), or in the Step 7 we access it at our machine level address DNS name which is 'http://qa-vms-2022hv' for the URL to enter in the web browser for us. In your case that address would be the CMon Server Address that you specified near the end of the CMon installation (or you can just utilize the IP or DNS address of your Windows Server machine that CMon is installed on).