Abstract
The Spider Business Center (SBC) is an integrated, secure solution for online subscription and management of all GNSS network services. It smoothly integrates Leica GNSS Spider and Leica Spider 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 to GNSS real-time and post-processing services. It is designed to monitor service usage, to enable the exchange of data, and to view online network and rover status.
The GNSS Spider Network Server connects to SBC. It submits the available real-time products to SBC, where these can then be combined into articles. Registered end users can subscribe to these articles, or they can be assigned by administrators, who also authorise subscription requests.
System Requirements and Installation
Please see the Leica Spider Suite Installation Guide for system requirements, installation, and basic configuration details. This document can be found as part of the installation package.
System Components
SBC Central Server
The SBC Central Server is responsible for all the core business logic, including database management. It processes and manages all configuration, registration, access and authorisation requests; serves the SBC Web Frontend, and exposes the interface which the GNSS Spider Network Server uses to synchronise its real-time products. It stores its data in a dedicated SQL Server database. It can be co-located with the GNSS Spider Network Server or deployed on separate hosts; a distributed installation is supported.
SBC Proxy Server
The SBC Proxy Server is the public entry point to SBC. It is a reverse proxy that terminates the secure (HTTPS) connection from Internet users and forwards requests to the internal SBC Central Server and SBC Identity Server. It takes care of secure communication between the SBC back-end services 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 Server.
SBC Web Frontend
The SBC Web Frontend, or web portal, provides the graphical user interface (GUI) for the configuration and management functionality of SBC. It is a single-page web application (Angular) and 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.
The Web Frontend is built into and served by the SBC Central Server; it does not require a separate web server. Users reach it through the SBC Proxy Server, which is the public entry point.
SBC Identity Server
The SBC Identity Server is an Identity Provider (IdP). As such, it is a centralised system that creates, stores, and manages digital identities for users or devices. It securely verifies who a user is and issues credentials or secure tokens to external applications. The SBC Central Server is the external application in this case.
The SBC Identity Server stores its data in a dedicated SQL Server database. By default, it is deployed alongside the SBC Central Server. Technically, a distributed installation is supported as well.
X-pos Server Repository Manager
The Leica X-pos Server is an optional extension of the Leica Spider suite, which provides the Post-Processing services to clients.
The X-pos Repository Manager service handles the X-pos repository by receiving data from the Leica GNSS Spider Site and Network Server and archiving it in the configured repository location.
X-pos Server Application Service
The X-pos Application Service manages access and use of the post-processing applications by the client users. I.e., it processes the RINEX, Virtual RINEX, Coordinate Computation, or Coordinate Transformation requests.
SBC API
SBC provides a powerful frontend API.
The API provides the ability to access the Spider Business Center using a defined API. The API can be used in software developed by 3rd parties to modify or utilise the content of the SBC system. SBC's RESTful API is based on JSON inputs, and you can use any HTTP client in any programming language to interact with the API.
The documentation of the API is accessible on your local installation by extending your URL with “/swagger”